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Tlr^Kl3 



PRESENTED m' 



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^hc ^austholb pbratg of @xp0stticrn. 



Under this title it is proposed to issue a series of volumes 
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READY, 

THE LIFE OF DAVID AS REFLECTED IN HIS 
PSALMS. 

By the Rev. Alexander Maclaren, D.D., Manchester. 

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<Ibe IbouaeboIO Xibrar^ of jEypoeltiom 



THE LIFE OF DAVID 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 




Edinburgh : 
Printed by Turnbicll &r> Sfieaj'S, 

FOR 

Macniven & Wallace, . . . Edinburgh. 
Macmillan & Co.. New York. 



THE 



LIFE OF DAVID 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 



BY 



ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D. 



MACMILLAN & CO. 



1880. 




.^.w^ 



Reprinted Jrovi the Sunday at Heme. 



LC 2Z- iZgHI 






CONTENTS. 

I. Introduction, 
11. Early Days, . 

III. Early Days — continued^ 

IV. The Exile, 
V. The Exile — conttJiued^ 

VI. The Exile — continued, 
VII. The Exile — co7tti7ittea^ 
VIII. The Exile — continued, 
IX. The King, 
X. The King — continued, 
XI. The King — continued^ 
XII. The King — continued, 

XIII. The Tears of the Penitent, 

XIV. Chastisements, 

XV. The Songs of the Fugitive, 



PAGE 

I 

u 
31 

49 
70 

86 
no 
130 
144 

157 
174 
185 

205 
232 

245 



The Life of David as Reflected 
in his Psalms. 



L-~INTRODUCTION. 

PERHAPS the most striking characteristic 
of the life of David is its romantic variety 
of circumstances. What a many-coloured career 
that was which began amidst the pastoral soli- 
tudes of Bethlehem, and ended in the chamber 
where the dying ears heard the blare of the 
trumpets that announced the accession of Bath- 
sheba's son ! He passes through the most sharply 
contrasted conditions, and from each gathers 
some fresh fitness for his great work of giving 
voice and form to all the phases of devout feel- 
ing. The early shepherd life deeply influenced 
his character, and has left its traces on many a 
line of his psalms. 

" Love had he found in huts where poor men He ; 
His daily teachers had been woods and rills ; 
The silence that is in the starry sky, 
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,'^ 

A 



2 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

And then, in strange contrast with the medita- 
tive quiet and lowly duties of these first years, 
came the crowded vicissitudes of the tempestu- 
ous course through which he reached his throne 
— court minstrel, companion and friend of a 
king, idol of the people, champion of the armies 
of God — and in his sudden elevation keeping the 
gracious sweetness of his lowlier, and perhaps 
happier days. The scene changes with startling 
suddenness to the desert. He is "hunted like 
a partridge upon the mountains," a fugitive and 
half a freebooter, taking service at foreign courts, 
and lurking on the frontiers with a band of out- 
laws recruited from the " dangerous classes " of 
Israel. Like Dante and many more, he has to 
learn the weariness of the exile's lot — how hard 
his fare, how homeless his heart, how cold the 
courtesies of aliens, how unslumbering the sus- 
picions which watch the refugee who fights on 
the side of his " natural enemies." One more 
swift transition and he is on the throne, for long 
years victorious, prosperous, and beloved. 

" Nor did he change ; but kept in lofty place 
The wisdom which adversity had bred," 

till suddenly he is plunged into the mire, and 
falsifies all his past, and ruins for ever, by the 



AS REFLECTED IN HTS PSALMS. 3 

sin of his mature age, his peace of heart and 
the prosperity of his kingdom. Thenceforward 
trouble is never far away ; and his later years 
are shaded with the saddening consciousness of 
his great fault, as well as by hatred and rebel- 
lion and murder in his family, and discontent 
and alienation in his kingdom. 

None of the great men of Scripture pass 
through a course of so many changes ; none of 
them touched human life at so many points ; 
none of them were so tempered and polished by 
swift alternation of heat and cold, by such heavy 
blows and the friction of such rapid revolutions. 
Like his great Son and Lord, though in a low^er 
sense, he, too, must be " in all points tempted 
like as we are," that his words may be fitted for 
the solace and strength of the whole world. 
Poets "learn in suffering what they teach in 
song." These quick transitions of fortune, and 
this wide experience, are the many-coloured 
threads from which the rich web of his psalms 
is woven. 

And while the life is singularly varied, the 
character is also singularly full and versatile. 
In this respect, too, he is most unlike the other 
leading figures of Old Testament history. Con- 



4 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

trast him, for example, with the stern majesty 
of Moses, austere and simple as the tables of 
stone ; or with the unvarying tone in the gaunt 
strength of Elijah. These and the other mighty 
men in Israel are like the ruder instruments of 
music — the trumpet of Sinai, with its one pro- 
longed note. David is like his own harp of many 
chords, through which the breath of God mur- 
mured, drawing forth wailing and rejoicing, the 
clear ring of triumphant trust, the low plaint of 
penitence, the blended harmonies of all devout 
emotions. 

The man had his faults — grave enough. Let 
it be remembered that no one has judged them 
more rigorously than himself. The critics who 
have delighted to point at them have been an- 
ticipated by the penitent ; and their indictment 
has been little more than the quotation of his 
own confession. His tremulously susceptible 
nature, especially assailable by the delights of 
sense, led him astray. There are traces in his 
life of occasional craft and untruthfulness which 
even the exigencies of exile and war do not 
wholly palliate. Flashes of fierce vengeance at 
times break from the clear sky of his generous 
nature. His strong affection became, in at least 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 5 

one case, weak and foolish fondness for an un- 
worthy son. 

But when all this is admitted, there remains a 
wonderfully rich, lovable character. He is the 
very ideal of a minstrel hero, such as the legends 
of the East especially love to paint. The shep- 
herd's staff or sling, the sword, the sceptre, and 
the lyre are equally familiar to his hands. 
That union of the soldier and the poet gives the 
life a peculiar charm, and is very strikingly 
brought out in that chapter of the book of 
Samuel (2 Sam. xxiii.) which begins, '' These be 
the last words of David," and after giving the 
swan-song of him whom it calls "the sweet 
psalmist of Israel," passes immediately to the 
other side of the dual character, with, " These 
be the names of the mighty men whom David 
had." 

Thus, on the one side, we see the true poetic 
temperament, with all its capacities for keenest 
delight and sharpest agony, with its tremulous 
mobility, its openness to every impression, its 
gaze of child-like wonder, and eager welcome to 
whatsoever things are lovely, its simplicity and 
self-forgetfulness, its yearnings " after worlds 
half realized," its hunger for love, its pity, and 



6 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

its tears. He was made to be the inspired poet 
of the reh'gious affections. 

And, on the other side, we see the greatest 
qualities of a military leader of the antique type, 
in which personal daring and a strong arm 
count for more than strategic skill. He dashes 
at Goliath with an enthusiasm of youthful cour- 
age and faith. While still in the earliest bloom 
of his manhood, at the head of his wild band of 
outlaws, he shows himself sagacious, full of re- 
source, prudent in counsel, and swift as lightning 
in act ; frank and generous, bold and gentle, 
cheery in defeat, calm in peril, patient in priva- 
tions and ready to share them with his men, 
modest and self-restrained in victory, chivalrous 
to his foes, ever watchful, ever hopeful — a born 
leader and king of men. 

The basis of all was a profound, joyous trust 
in his Shepherd God, an ardour of personal love 
to Him, such as had never before been ex- 
pressed, if it had ever found place, in Israel. 
That trust " opened his mouth to show forth " 
God's praise, and strengthened his "fingers to 
fight." He has told us himself what was his 
habitual temper, and how it was sustained : *^ I 
have set the Lord always before me. Because 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 7 

He IS at my right hand, I shall not be moved. 
Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory re- 
joiceth." (Psa. xvi. 8, 9.) 

Thus endowed, he moved among men with 
that irresistible fascination which only the great- 
est exercise. From the day when he stole like 
a sunbeam into the darkened chamber where 
Saul wrestled with the evil spirit, he bows all 
hearts that come under his spell. The women 
of Israel chant his name with song and timbrel, 
the daughter of Saul confesses her love unasked, 
the noble soul of Jonathan cleaves to him, the 
rude outlaws in his little army peril their lives to 
gratify his longing for a draught from the well 
where he had watered his father's flocks ; the 
priests let him take the consecrated bread, and 
trust him with Goliath's sword, from behind the 
altar; his lofty courtesy wins the heart of Abigail; 
the very king of the Philistines tells him that he 
is " good in his sight as an angel of God ; " the 
unhappy Saul's last word to him is a blessing ; 
six hundred men of Gath forsake home and 
country to follow his fortunes when he returns 
from exile ; and even in the dark close of his 
reign, though sin and self-indulgence, and neglect 
of his kingly duties, had weakened his subjects, 



8 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

loyalty, his flight before Absalom is brightened 
by instances of passionate devotion which no 
common character could have evoked ; and even 
then his people are ready to die for him, and in 
their affectionate pride call him *^ the light of 
Israel." It was a prophetic instinct which 
made Jesse call his youngest boy by a name 
apparently before unused — David, '' Beloved." 

The Spirit of God, acting through these great 
natural gifts, and using this diversified experi- 
ence of life, originated in him a new form of 
inspiration. The Law was the revelation of the 
mind, and, in some measure, of the heart, of God 
to man. The Psalm is the echo of the law, the 
return current set in motion by the outflow of 
the Divine will, the response of the heart of man 
to the manifested God. There had, indeed, 
been traces of hymns before David. There 
were the burst of triumph which the daughters 
of Israel sang, with timbrel and dance, over 
Pharaoh and his host ; the prayer of Moses the 
man of God (Psa. xc), so archaic in its tone, 
bearing in every line the impress of the weary 
wilderness and the law of death ; the song of 
the dying lawgiver (Deut. xxxii.); the passionate 
psean of Deborah; and some few briefer frag- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALIMS. 9 

ments. But, practically, the Psalm began with 
David ; and though many hands struck the harp 
after him, even down at least to the return from 
exile, he remains emphatically ^'the sweet psalm- 
ist of Israel." 

The psalms which are attributed to him have, 
on the whole, a marked similarity of manner. 
Their characteristics have been well summed up 
as " creative originality, predominantly elegiac 
tone, graceful form and movement, antique but 
lucid style ;"^ to which may be added the in- 
tensity of their devotion, the passion of Divine 
love that glows in them all. They correspond, 
too, with the circumstances of his life as given 
in the historical books. The early shepherd 
days, the manifold sorrows, the hunted wander- 
ings, the royal authority, the v/ars, the triumphs, 
the sin, the remorse, which are woven together 
so strikingly in the latter, all reappear in the 
psalms. The illusions, indeed, are for the most 
part general rather than special, as is natural. 
His words are thereby the better fitted for ready 
application to the trials of other lives. But it 
has been perhaps too hastily assumed that the 
allusions are so general as to make it impossible 

* Delitzsch, Kommentar, u. d. Psalter II. 376. 



lO THE LIFE OF DAVID 

to connect them with any precise events, or to 
make the psalms and the history mutually 
illustrative. Much, no doubt, must be con- 
jectured rather than affirmed, and much must 
be left undetermined ; but when all deductions 
on that score have been made, it still appears 
possible to carry the process sufficiently far to 
gain fresh insight into the force and definiteness 
of many of David's words, and to use them with 
tolerable confidence as throwing light upon the 
narrative of his career. The attempt is made in 
some degree in this volume. 

It will be necessary to prefix a few further 
remarks on the Davidic psalms in general. Can 
we tell which are David's ? The Psalter, as is 
generally known, is divided into five books or 
parts, probably from some idea that it corre- 
sponded with the Pentateuch. These five books 
are marked by a doxology at the close of each, 
except the last. The first portion consists of 
Psa. i. — xli. ; the second of Psa. xlii. — Ixxii ; the 
third of Psa. Ixxiii. — Ixxxix ; the fourth of Psa. 
xc. — cvi. ; and the fifth of Psa. cvii. — cl. The 
psalms attributed to David are unequally distri- 
buted through these five books. There are 
seventy-three in all, and they run thus : — In the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I I 

first book there are thirty-seven ; so that if we 
regard psalms i. and ii. as a kind of double 
introduction, a frontispiece and vignette title- 
page to the whole collection, the first book proper 
only two which are not regarded as David's. 
The second book has a much smaller proportion, 
only eighteen out of thirty-one. The third book 
has but one, the fourth two ; while the fifth has 
fifteen, eight of which (cxxxviii. — cxlv.) occur 
almost at the close. The intention is obvious — 
to throw the Davidic psalms as much as possible 
together in the first two books. And the in- 
ference is not unnatural that these may have 
formed an earlier collection, to which were after- 
wards added the remaining three, with a con- 
siderable body of alleged psalms of David, 
which had subsequently come to light, placed side 
by side at the end, so as to round off the whole. 
Be that as it may, one thing is clear from the 
arrangement of the Psalter, namely, that the 
superscriptions w^hich give the authors' names 
are at least as old as the collection itself; for 
they have guided the order of the collection in 
the grouping not only of Davidic psalms, but 
also of those attributed to the sons of Korah 
(xlii. — xlix.) and to Asaph (Ixxiii. — Ixxxiii.) 



I 2 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

The question of the reliableness of these 
superscriptions is hotly debated. The balance 
of modern opinion is decidedly against their 
genuineness. As in greater matters, so here 
" the higher criticism " comes to the considera- 
tion of their claims with a prejudice against 
them, and on very arbitrary grounds determines 
for itself, quite irrespective of these ancient 
voices, the date and authorship of the psalms. 
The extreme form of this tendency is to be 
found in the masterly work of Ewald, who has 
devoted all his vast power of criticism (and eked 
it out with all his equally great power of con- 
fident assertion) to the book, and has come to 
the conclusion that we have but eleven of 
David's psalms, — which is surely a result that 
may lead to questionings as to the method 
which has attained it. 

These editorial notes are proved to be of ex- 
treme antiquity by such considerations as these • 
The Septuagint translators found them, and 
did not understand them ; the synagogue pre- 
serves no traditions to explain them ; the Book 
of Chronicles throws no light upon them ; they 
are very rare in the two last books of the Psalter 
(Delitzsch, ii. 393). In some cases they are 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 3 

obviously erroneous, but in the greater number 
there is nothing inconsistent with their correct- 
ness in the psalms to which they are appended ; 
w^hile very frequently they throw a flood of 
light upon these, and all but prove their trust- 
w^orthiness by their appropriateness. They are 
not authoritative, but they merit respectful con- 
sideration, and, as Dr Perowne puts it in his 
valuable work on the Psalms, stand on a par 
with the subscriptions to the Epistles in the New 
Testament. Regarding them thus, and yet 
examining the psalms to which they are prefixed, 
there seem to be about forty-five which we may 
attribute with some confidence to David, and 
with these w^e shall be concerned in this book. 



14 THE LIFE OF DAVID 



XL— EARLY DAYS. 

THE life of David is naturally divided into 
epochs, of which we may avail ourselves 
for the more ready arrangement of our ma- 
terial. These are — his early years up to his 
escape from the court of Saul, his exile, the 
prosperous beginning of his reign, his sin and 
penitence, his flight before Absalom's rebellion, 
and the darkened end. 

We have but faint incidental traces of his life 
up to his anointing by Samuel, with which the 
narrative in the historical books opens. But 
perhaps the fact that the story begins with that 
consecration to office, is of more value than the 
missing biography of his childhood could have 
been. It teaches us the point of view from 
which Scripture regards its greatest names — as 
nothing, except in so far as they are God's in- 
struments. Hence its carelessness, notwith- 
standing that so much of it is history, of all that 
merely illustrates the personal character of its 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 5 

heroes. Hence, too, the clearness with which, 
notwithstanding that indifference, the living men 
are set before us — the image cut with half a 
dozen strokes of the chisel. 

We do not know the age of David when 
Samuel appeared in the little village with the 
horn of sacred oil in his hand. The only ap- 
proximation, to it is furnished by the fact, that 
he was thirty at the beginning of his reign. 
(2 Sam. V. 4.) If we take into account that his 
exile must have lasted for a very considerable 
period (one portion of it, his second flight to the 
Philistines, was sixteen months, i Sam. xxvii. 
7), — that the previous residence at the court of 
Saul must have been long enough to give time 
for his gradual rise to popularity, and there- 
after for the gradual development of the king's 
insane hatred, — that further back still there was 
an indefinite period, between the fight with 
Goliath, and the first visit as a minstrel- 
physician to the palace, which was spent at 
Bethlehem, and that that visit itself cannot have 
been very brief, since in its course he became 
very dear and familiar to Saul, — it will not seem 
that all these events could be crowded into less 
than some twelve or fifteen years, or that he 



I 6 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

could have been more than a lad of some six- 
teen years of age when Samuel's hand smoothed 
the sacred oil on his clustering curls. 

How life had gone with him till then, we can 
easily gather from the narrative of Scripture. 
His father s household seems to have been one 
in which modest frugality ruled. There is no 
trace of Jesse having servants ; his youngest 
child does menial work ; the present which he 
sends to his king when David goes to court was 
simple, and such as a man in humble life would 
give — an ass load of bread, one skin of wine, 
and one kid — his flocks were small — " a few 
sheep." It would appear as if prosperity had 
not smiled on the family since the days of Jesse's 
grandfather, Boaz, that "mighty man of wealth." 
David's place in the household does not seem to 
have been a happy one. His father scarcely 
reckoned him amongst his sons, and answers 
Samuel's question, if the seven burly husbandmen 
whom he has seen are all his children, with a 
trace of contempt as he remembers that there 
is another, " and, behold, he keepeth the sheep." 
Of his mother we hear but once, and that 
incidentally, for a moment, long after. His 
brothers had no love for him, and do not appear 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 7 

to have shared either his heart or his fortunes. 
The boy evidently had the usual fate of souls 
like his, to grow up in uncongenial circumstances, 
little understood and less sympathised with by 
the common-place people round them, and 
thrown back therefore all the more decisively 
upon themselves. The process sours and spoils 
some, but it is the making of more — and where, 
as in this case, the nature is thrown back upon 
God, and not on its own morbid operation, 
strength comes from repression, and sweetness 
from endurance. He may have received some 
instruction in one of Samuel's schools" for the 
prophets, but we are left in entire ignorance of 
what outward helps to unfold itself were given 
to his budding life. 

Whatever others he had, no doubt those which 
are emphasized in the Bible story were the chief, 
namely, his occupation and the many gifts 
which it brought to him. The limbs, ''like 
hinds' feet," the sinewy arms which ''broke a 
bow of steel," the precision with which he used 
the sling, the agility which " leaped over a 
rampart," the health that glowed in his " ruddy" 
face, were the least of his obligations to the 
breezy uplands, where he kept his father's sheep. 

B 



I 8 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

His early life taught him courage, when he 
"smote the lion" and laid hold by his ugly 
muzzle of the bear that *' rose against him," 
rearing itself upright for the fatal hug. Solitude 
and familiarity with nature helped to nurture 
the poetical side of his character, and to 
strengthen that meditative habit which blends 
so strangely with his impetuous activity, and 
which for the most part kept tumults and toils 
from invading his central soul. They threw him 
back on God who peopled the solitude and 
spoke in all nature. Besides this, he acquired 
in the sheepcote lessons which he practised on 
the throne, that rule means service, and that 
the shepherd of men holds his office in order 
that he may protect and guide. And in the 
lowly associations of his humble home, he 
learned the life of the people, their simple joys, 
their unconspicuous toils, their unnoticed sor- 
rows — a priceless piece of knowledge both for 
the poet and for the king. 

A breach in all the tranquil habits of this 
modest life was made by Samuel's astonishing 
errand. The story is told with wonderful 
picturesqueness and dramatic force. The min- 
ute account of the successive rejections of his 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. IQ 

brothers, Samuel's question and Jesse's answer, 
and then the pause of idle waiting till the mes- 
senger goes and returns, heighten the expecta- 
tion with which we look for his appearance. 
And then what a sweet young face is lovingly 
painted for us ! '^ He was ruddy, and withal of 
a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to" 
(i Sam. xvi. 12) — of fair complexion, with 
golden hair, which is rare among these swarthy, 
black-locked easterns, with lovely eyes (for that 
is the meaning of the words which the English 
Bible renders " of a beautiful countenance "), 
large and liquid as become a poet. So he stood 
before the old prophet, and with swelling heart 
and reverent awe received the holy chrism. In 
silence, as it would seem, Samuel anointed him. 
Whether the secret of his high destiny was im- 
parted to him then, or left to be disclosed in 
future years, is not told. But at all events, 
whether with full understanding of what was 
before him or no, he must have been conscious 
of a call that would carry him far away from 
the pastures and olive yards of the little hamlet, 
and of a new Spirit stirring in him from that 
day forward. 

This sudden change in all the outlook of his 



20 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

life must have given new materials for thought 
when he went back to his humble task. Re- 
sponsibility, or the prospect of it, makes lads 
into men very quickly. Graver meditations, 
humbler consciousness of weakness, a firmer 
trust in God who had laid the burden upon him, 
would do in days the work of years. And the 
necessity for bidding back the visions of the 
future in order to do faithfully the obscure 
duties of the present, would add self-control and 
patience, not usually the graces of youth. How 
swiftly he matured is singularly shown in the 
next recorded incident — his summons to the 
court of Saul, by the character of him drawn by 
the courtier who recommends him to the king. 
He speaks of David in words more suitable to a 
man of established renown than to a stripling. 
He is minstrel and warrior, "cunning in playing, 
and a mighty valiant man," and "skilled in 
speech (already eloquent), and fair in form, and 
the Lord is with him." (i Sam. xvi. i8.) So 
quickly had the new circumstances and the 
energy of the Spirit of God, like tropical sun- 
shine, ripened his soul. 

That first visit to the court was but an 
episode in his life, however helpful to his growth 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2 1 

it may have been. It would give him the 
knowledge of new scenes, widen his experience, 
and prepare him for the future. But it cannot 
have been of very long duration. Possibly his 
harp lost its power over Saul's gloomy spirit, 
when he had become familiar with its notes. 
For whatever reason, he returned to his father s 
house, and gladly exchanged the favour at 
court, which might have seemed to a merely 
ambitious man the first step towards fulfilling 
the prophecy of Samuel's anointing, for the 
freedom of the pastoral solitudes about Bethle- 
hem. There he remained, living to outward 
seeming as in the quiet days before these two 
great earthquakes in his life, but with deeper 
thoughts and new power, with broader experi- 
ence, and a wider horizon, until the hour when 
he was finally wrenched from his seclusion, 
and flung into the whirlpool of his public 
career. 

There are none of David's psalms which can 
be with any certainty referred to this first period 
of his life ; but it has left deep traces on many 
of them. The allusions to natural scenery and 
the frequent references to varying aspects of 
the shepherd's life are specimens of these. One 



2 2 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

characteristic of the poetic temperament is the 
faithful remembrance and cherishing of early 
days. How fondly he recalled them is shown 
in that most pathetic incident of his longing, as 
a weary exile, for one draught of water from 
the well at Bethlehem — where in the dear old 
times he had so often led his flocks. 

But though we cannot say confidently that 
we have any psalms prior to his first exile, there 
are several which, whatever their date may be, 
are echoes of his thoughts in these first days. 
This is especially the case in regard to the 
group which describe varying aspects of nature 
— viz., Psalms xix., viii., xxix. They are un- 
like his later psalms in the almost entire absence 
of personal references, or of any trace of press- 
ing cares, or of signs of a varied experience of 
human life. In their self-forgetful contempla- 
tion of nature, in their silence about sorrow, in 
their tranquil beauty, they resemble the youth- 
ful works of many a poet whose later verse 
throbs with quivering consciousness of life's 
agonies, or wrestles strongly with life's prob- 
lems. They may not unnaturally be regarded 
as the outpouring of a young heart at leisure 
from itself, and from pain, far from men and 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 23 

very near God. The fresh mountain air of 
Bethlehem blows through them, and the dew of 
life's quiet morning is on them. The early- 
experience supplied their materials, whatever 
was the date of their composition ; and in them 
we can see what his inward life was in these 
budding years. The gaze of child-like wonder 
and awe upon the blazing brightness of the 
noonday, and on the mighty heaven with all its 
stars, the deep voice with which all creation 
spoke of God, the great thoughts of the dignity 
of man (thoughts ever welcome to lofty youthful 
souls), the gleaming of an inward light brighter 
than all suns, the consciousness of mysteries of 
weakness which may become miracles of sin in 
one's own heart, the assurance of close relation 
to God as His anointed and His servant, the cry 
for help and guidance — all this is what we 
should expect David to have thought and felt 
as he wandered among the hills, alone with God ; 
and this is what these psalms give us. 

Common to them all is the peculiar manner 
of looking upon nature, so uniform in David's 
psalms, so unlike more modern descriptive 
poetry. He can smite out a picture in a phrase, 
but he does not care to paint landscapes. He 



24 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

feels the deep analogies between man and his 
dwelling-place, but he does not care to lend to 
nature a shadowy life, the reflection of our own. 
Creation is to him neither a subject for poetical 
description, nor for scientific examination. It 
is nothing but the garment of God, the 
apocalypse of the heavenly. And common to 
them all is also the swift transition from the 
outward facts which reveal God, to the spiritual 
world, where His presence is, if it were possible, 
yet more needful, and His operations yet 
mightier. And common to them all is a certain 
rush of full thought and joyous power, which is 
again a characteristic of youthful work, and is 
unlike the elegiac tenderness and pathos of 
David's later hymns. 

The nineteenth Psalm paints for us the glory 
of the heavens by day, as the eighth by night. 
The former gathers up the impressions of many 
a fresh morning when the solitary shepherd-boy 
watched the sun rising over the mountains of 
Moab, which close the eastern view from the 
hills above Bethlehem. The sacred silence of 
dawn, the deeper hush of night, have voice for 
his ear. " No speech ! and no words ! unheard is 
their voice." But yet, '' in all the earth goeth 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 25 

forth their hne,* and in the end of the habitable 
world their sayings." The heavens and the 
firmament, the linked chorus of day and night, 
are heralds of God's glory, with silent speech, 
heard in all lands, an unremitting voice. And 
as he looks, there leaps into the eastern heavens, 
not with the long twilight of northern lands, the 
sudden splendour, the sun radiant as a bride- 
groom from the bridal chamber, like some 
athlete impatient for the course. How the joy 
of morning and its new vigour throb in the 
words ! And then he watches the strong runner 
climbing the heavens till the fierce heat beats 
down into the deep cleft of the Jordan, and all 
the treeless southern hills, as they slope towards 
the desert, lie bare and blazing beneath the 
beams. 

The sudden transition from the revelation of 
God in nature to His voice in the law, has 
seemed to many critics unaccountable, except 
on the supposition that this psalm is made up 
of two fragments, put together by a later com- 
piler ; and some of them have even gone so far 

* Their boundary, i.e.^ their territory, or the region through 
which their witness extends. Others render "their chord," or 
sound (LXX. Ewald, etc.) 



26 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

as to maintain that '' the feeHng which saw God 
revealed in the law did not arise till the time 
of Josiah."* But such a hypothesis is not re- 
quired to explain either the sudden transition'or 
the difference in style and rhythm between the 
two parts of the psalm, which unquestionably 
exists. The turn from the outer world to the 
better light of God's word, is most natural ; the 
abruptness of it is artistic and impressive ; the 
difference of style and measure gives emphasis 
to the contrast. There is also an obvious con- 
nection between the two parts, inasmuch as the 
law is described by epithets, which in part hint 
at its being a brighter sun, enlightening the eyes. 
The Word which declares the will of the Lord 
is better than the heavens which tell His glory. 
The abundance of synonyms for that word 
show how familiar to his thoughts it was. 
To him it is " the law," " the testimonies " by 
which God witnesses of Himself and of man : 
" the statutes," the fixed settled ordinances ; 
that which teaches " the fear of God," the 
"judgments" or utterances of His mind on 
human conduct. They are " perfect, firm, right, 
clean, pure," — like that spotless sun — " eternal, 

* * ' Psalms chronologically arranged " — following Ewald. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 27 

true." " They quicken, make wise, enlighten," 
even as the light of the lower world. His heart 
prizes them " more than gold," of which in his 
simple life he knew so little ; more than " the 
honey," which he had often seen dropping from 
" the comb " in the pastures of the wilderness. 

And then the twofold contemplation rises 
into the loftier region of prayer. He feels that 
there are dark depths in his soul, gloomier pits 
than any into which the noontide sun shines. 
He speaks as one who is conscious of dormant 
evils, which life has not yet evolved, and his 
prayer is more directed towards the future than 
the past, and is thus very unlike the tone of the 
later psalms, that wail out penitence and plead 
for pardon. " Errors," or weaknesses, — " faults " 
unknown to himself, — "high-handed sins,"* — 
such is the climax of the evils from which he 
prays for deliverance. He knows himself '' Thy 
servant" (2 Sam. vii. 5, 8 ; Psa. Ixxviii. 70) — an 
epithet which may refer to his consecration to 
God's work by Samuel's anointing. He needs 
not only a God who sets His glory in the 

* The form of the word would make " reckless men " a more 
natural translation ; but probably the context requires a third, 
more aggravated sort of sin. 



28 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

heavens, nor even one whose will is made 
known, but one who will touch his spirit, — not 
merely a Maker, but a pardoning God ; and his 
faith reaches its highest point as his song closes 
with the sacred name of the covenant Jehovah, 
repeated for the seventh time, and invoked in 
one final aspiration of a trustful heart, as " my 
Rock, and my Redeemer." 

The eighth psalm is a companion picture, a 
night-piece, which, like the former, speaks of 
many an hour of lonely brooding below the 
heavens, whether its composition fall within this 
early period or no. The prophetic and doctrinal 
value of the psalms is not our main subject 
in the present volume, so that we have to 
touch but very lightly on this grand hymn. 
What does it show us of the singer ? We see 
him, like other shepherds on the same hills, long 
after " keeping watch over his flocks by night,'* 
and overwhelmed by all the magnificence of an 
eastern sky, with its lambent lights. So bright, 
so changeless, so far, — how great they are, how 
small the boy that gazes up so wistfully. Are 
they gods, as all but his own nation believed ? 
No, — " the work of Thy fingers," " which Thou 
hast ordained." The consciousness of God as 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 29 

their Maker delivers from the temptation of 
confounding bigness with greatness, and wakes 
into new energy that awful sense of personality 
which towers above all the stars. He is a babe 
and suckling — is that a trace of the early com- 
position of the psalm ? — still he knows that out 
of his lips, already beginning to break into song, 
and out of the lips of his fellows, God perfects 
praise. There speaks the sweet singer of Israel, 
prizing as the greatest of God's gifts his growing 
faculty, and counting his God-given words as 
nobler than the voice of ''night unto night.'' 
God's fingers made these, but God's own breath 
is in him. God ordained them, but God visits 
him. The description of man's dignity and 
dominion indicates how familiar David was 
with the story in Genesis. It may perhaps also, 
besides all the large prophetic truths which it 
contains, have some special reference to his own 
earlier experience. It is at least worth noting 
that he speaks of the dignity of man as kingly, 
like that which was dawning on himself, and 
that the picture has no shadows either of sorrow 
or of sin, — a fact which may point to his younger 
days, when lofty thoughts of the greatness of 
the soul are ever natural and when in his case 



30 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

the afflictions and crimes that make their pre- 
sence felt in all his later works had not fallen 
upon him. Perhaps, too, it may not be alto- 
gether fanciful to suppose that we may see the 
shepherd-boy surrounded by his flocks, and the 
wild creatures that prowled about the fold, and 
the birds asleep in their coverts beneath the 
moonlight, in his enumeration of the subjects of 
his first and happiest kingdom, where he ruled 
far away from men and sorrow, seeing God 
everywhere, and learning to perfect praise from 
his youthful lips. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 3 1 



IIL— EARLY DKY^— CONTINUED. 

IN addition to the psalms already considered, 
which are devoted to the devout contem- 
plation of nature, and stand in close connection 
with David's early days, there still remains one 
universally admitted to be his. The twenty- 
ninth psalm, like both the preceding, has to do 
with the glory of God as revealed in the 
heavens, and with earth only as the recipient of 
skyey influences ; but while these breathed the 
profoundest tranquillity, as they watched the 
silent splendour of the sun, and the peace of 
moonlight shed upon a sleeping world, this is 
all tumult and noise. It is a highly elaborate 
and vivid picture of a thunderstorm, such as 
must often have broken over the shepherd- 
psalmist as he crouched under some shelf of 
limestone, and gathered his trembling charge 
about him. Its very structure reproduces in 
sound an echo of the rolling peals reverberating 
among the hills. 



32 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

There is first an invocation, in the highest 
strain of devout poetry, calling upon the " sons 
of God," the angels who dwell above the lower 
sky, and who see from above the slow gathering 
of the storm-clouds, to ascribe to Jehovah the 
glory of His name — His character as set forth in 
the tempest. They are to cast themselves be- 
fore Him "in holy attire," as priests of the 
heavenly sanctuary. Their silent and ex- 
pectant worship is like the brooding stillness 
before the storm. We feel the waiting hush in 
heaven and earth. 

Then the tempest breaks. It crashes and 
leaps through the short sentences, each like the 
clap of the near thunder. 

a. The voice of Jehovah (is) on the waters. 
The God of glory thunders. 

Jehovah (is) on many waters. 
The voice of Jehovah in strength ! 
The voice of Jehovah in majesty ! 

b. The voice of Jehovah rending the cedars ! 

And Jehovah reiids the cedars of Lebanoii. 
And makes them leap Hke a calf ; 
Lebanon and Sirion like a young buffalo. 
The voice of Jehovah hewing flashes of fire ! 

c. The voice of Jehovah shakes the desert, 

JehovaJi shakes the Kadesh desert. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 33 

The voice of Jehovah makes the hinds writhe 
And scathes the woods — and in His temple — 
— All in it (are) saying, " Glory.'^ 

Seven times the roar shakes the world. The 
voice of the seven thunders is the voice of 
Jehovah. In the short clauses, with their uniform 
structure, the pause between, and the recurrence 
of the same initial words, we hear the successive 
peals, the silence that parts them, and the 
monotony of their unvaried sound. Thrice we 
have the reverberation rolling through the sky 
or among the hills, imitated by clauses which 
repeat previous ones, as indicated by the italics, 
and one forked flame blazes out in the brief, 
lightning-like sentence, "The voice of Jehovah 
(is) hewing flashes of fire," which wonderfully 
gives the impression of their streaming fiercely 
forth, as if cloven from some solid block of fire, 
their swift course, and their instantaneous ex- 
tinction. 

The range and effects of the storm, too, are 
vividly painted. It is first '' on the waters," 
which may possibly mean the Mediterranean, 
but more probably, " the waters that are above 
the firmament," and so depicts the clouds as 
gathering high in air. Then it comes down with 

C 



34 I^HE LIFE OF DAVID 

a crash on the northern mountains, splintering 
the gnarled cedars, and making Lebanon rock 
with all its woods — leaping across the deep 
valley of Coelo-Syria, and smiting Hermon (for 
which Sirion is a Sidonian name), the crest of 
the Anti Lebanon, till it reels. Onward it 
sweeps — or rather, perhaps, it is all around the 
psalmist ; and even while he hears the voice 
rolling from the furthest north, the extreme 
south echoes the roar. The awful voice shakes* 
the wilderness, as it booms across its level sur- 
face. As far south as Kadesh (probably Petra) 
the tremor 'spreads, and away in the forests of 
Edom the wild creatures in their terror slip their 
calves, and the oaks are scathed and stripped of 
their leafy honours. And all the while, like a 
mighty diapason sounding on through the 
tumult, the voice of the sons of God in the 
heavenly temple is heard proclaiming " Glory ! " 
The psalm closes with lofty words of confi- 
dence, built on the story of the past, as well as 
on the contemplation of the present. "Jehovah 
sat throned for (i.e., to send on earth) the flood" 

* Delitzsch would render *' whirls in circles" — a picturesque 
allusion to the sand pillars which accompany storms in the 
desert. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 35 

which once drowned the world of old. "Jehovah 
will sit throned, a King for ever." That ancient 
judgment spoke of His power over all the forces 
of nature, in their most terrible form. So now 
and for ever, all are His servants, and effect His 
purposes. Then, as the tempest rolls away, 
spent and transient, the sunshine streams out 
anew from the softened blue over a freshened 
world, and every raindrop on the leaves twinkles 
into diamond light, and the end of the psalm is 
like the after brightness ; and the tranquil low 
voice of its last words is like the songs of the 
birds again as the departing storm growls low 
and faint on the horizon. " The Lord will bless 
His people with peace." 

Thus, then, nature spoke to this young heart. 
The silence was vocal ; the darkness, bright; the 
tumult, order — and all was the revelation of a 
present God. It is told of one of our great 
writers that, when a child, he was found lying 
on a hill-side during a thunderstorm, and 
at each flash clapping his hands and shouting, 
unconscious of danger, and stirred to ecstasy. 
David, too, felt all the poetic elevation, and 
natural awe, in the presence of the crashing 
storm; but he felt something more. To him 



36 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

the thunder was not a power to tremble before, 
not a mere subject for poetic contemplation. 
Still less was it something, the like of which 
could be rubbed out of glass and silk, and 
which he had done with when he knew its laws. 
No increase of knowledge touching the laws of 
physical phenomena in the least affects the 
point of view which these Nature-psalms take. 
David said, " God makes and moves all things." 
We may be able to complete the sentence by a 
clause which tells something of the methods of 
His operation. But that is only a parenthesis 
after all, and the old truth remains widened, not 
overthrown by it. The psalmist knew that all 
being and action had their origin in God. He 
saw the last links of the chain, and knew that it 
was rivetted to the throne of God, though the 
intermediate links were unseen ; and even the 
fact that there were any was not present to his 
mind. We know something of these; but the 
first and the last of the series to him, are the 
first and the last to us also. To us as to him, 
the silent splendour of noonday speaks of God, 
and the nightly heavens pour the soft radiance 
of His '' excellent name over all the earth." The 
tempest is His voice, and the wildest commo- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 37 

tions in nature and among men break in obedient 
waves around His pillared throne. 

** Well roars the storm to those who hear 
A deeper voice across the storm ! " 

There still remains one other psalm which 
may be used as illustrating the early life of 
David. The Twenty-third psalm is coloured 
throughout by the remembrances of his youthful 
occupation, even if its actual composition is of 
a later date. Some critics, indeed, think that 
the mention in the last verse of ^* the house of 
the Lord " compels the supposition of an origin 
subsequent to the building of the Temple ; but 
the phrase in question need not have anything 
to do with tabernacle or temple, and is most 
naturally accounted for by the preceding image 
of God as the Host who feasts His servants at 
His table. There are no other notes of time in 
the psalm, unless, with some commentators, we 
see an allusion in that image of the furnished 
table to the seasonable hospitality of the Gilead- 
ite chieftains during David's flight before Ab- 
salom (2 Sam. xvii. 27 — 29) — a reference which 
appears prosaic and flat. The absence of traces 
of distress and sorrow — so constantly present 



38 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

in the later songs — may be urged with some 
force in favour of the early date ; and if we 
followvone of the most valuable commentators 
(Hupfeld) in translating all the verbs as futures, 
and so make the whole a hymn of hope, we 
seem almost obliged to suppose that we have 
here the utterance of a youthful spirit, which 
ventured to look forward, because it first looked 
upward. In any case, the psalm is a transcript 
of thoughts that had been born and cherished 
in many a meditative hour among the lonely 
hills of Bethlehem. It is the echo of the shep- 
herd life. We see in it the incessant care, the 
love to his helpless charge, which was expressed 
in and deepened by all his toil for them. He 
had to think for their simplicity, to fight for 
their defencelessness, to find their pasture, to 
guard them while they lay amid the fresh 
grass ; sometimes to use his staff in order to 
force their heedlessness with loving violence 
past tempting perils ; sometimes to guide them 
through gloomy gorges, where they huddled 
close at his heels ; sometimes to smite the lion 
and the bear that prowled about the fold — but 
all was for their good and meant their comfort. 
And thus hehas learned, in preparation for his own 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSAr.MS. 39 

kingdom, the inmost meaning of pre-eminence 
among^men — and, more precious lesson still, thus 
he has learned the very heart of God. Long 
before, Jacob had spoken of Him as the '^ Shep- 
herd of Israel ; " but it was reserved for David 
to bring that sweet and Avonderful name into 
closer relations with the single soul ; and, with 
that peculiar enthusiasm of personal reliance, 
and recognition of God's love to the individual 
which stamps all his psalms, to say '* The Lord 
is my Shepherd." These dumb companions of 
his, in their docility to his guidance, and ab- 
solute trust in his care, had taught him the 
secret of peace in helplessness, of patience in 
ignorance. The green strips of meadow-land 
where the clear waters brought life, the wearied 
flocks sheltered from the mid-day heat, the quiet 
course of the little stream, the refreshment of 
the sheep by rest and pasture, the smooth paths 
which he tried to choose for them, the rocky 
defiles through which they had to pass, the rod 
in his hand that guided, and chastised, and 
defended, and was never lifted in anger, — all 
these, the familiar sights of his youth, pass 
before us as we read ; and to us too, in our widely 
different social state, have become the undying 



40 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

emblems of the highest care and the wisest love. 
The psalm witnesses how close to the youthful 
heart the consciousness of God must have been, 
which could thus transform and glorify the little 
things which were so familiar. We can feel, in 
a kind of lazy play of sentiment, the fitness of the 
shepherd's life to suggest thoughts of God — 
because it is not our life. But it needs both a 
meditative habit and a devout heart, to feel that 
the trivialities of our own daily tasks speak to 
us of Him. The heavens touch the earth on 
the horizon of our vision, but it always seems 
furthest to the sky from the spot where we 
stand. To the psalmist, however, — as in higher 
ways to his Son and Lord, — all things around 
him were full of God ; and as the majesties of 
nature, so the trivialities of man's works — shep- 
herds and fishermen — were solemn with deep 
meanings and shadows of the heavenly. With 
such lofty thoughts he fed his youth. 

The psalm, too, breathes the very spirit of 
sunny confidence and of perfect rest in God. 
We have referred to the absence of traces of 
sorrow, and to the predominant tone of hopeful- 
ness, as possibly favouring the supposition of an 
early origin. But it matters little whether they 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 4 I 

were young eyes which looked so courageously 
into the unknown future, or whether we have 
here the more solemn and weighty hopes of age, 
which can have few hopes at all, unless they be 
rooted in God. The spirit expressed in the 
psalm is so thoroughly David's, that in his 
younger days, before it was worn with responsi- 
bilities and sorrows, it must have been especially 
strong. We may therefore fairly take the tone 
of this song of the Shepherd God as expressing 
the characteristic of his godliness in the happy 
early years. In his solitude he was glad. One 
happy thought fills the spirit ; one simple emo- 
tion thrills the chords of his harp. No doubts, 
or griefs, or remorse throw their shadows upon 
him. He is conscious of dependence, but he is 
above want and fear. He does not ask, he 
has — he possesses God, and is at rest in Him. He 
is satisfied with that fruition which blesseth all 
who hunger for God, and is the highest form of 
communion with Him. As the present has no 
longings, the future has no terrors. All the 
horizon is clear, all the winds are still, the ocean 
at rest, " and birds of peace sit brooding on the 
charmed wave." If there be foes, God holds 
them back. If there lie far off among the hills 



42 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

any valley of darkness, its black portals cast no 
gloom over him, and will not when he enters. 
God is his Shepherd, and, by another image, 
God is his Host. The life which in one aspect, 
by reason of its continual change, and occupa- 
tion with outward things, may be compared to 
the journeyings of a flock, is in another aspect, 
by reason of its inward union with the stability 
of God, like sitting ever at the table which His 
hand has spread as for a royal banquet, where 
the oil of gladness glistens on every head, and 
the full cup of Divine pleasure is in every hand. 
For all the outward and pilgrimage aspect, the 
psalmist knows that only Goodness and Mercy 
— these two white-robed messengers of God — 
will follow his steps, however long may be the 
term of the days of his yet young life ; for all 
the inward, he is sure that, in calm, unbroken 
fellowship, he will dwell in the house of God, 
and that when the twin angels who fed and 
guided him all his young life long have "finished 
their charge, and the days of his journeyings are 
ended, there stretches beyond a still closer union 
with his heavenly Friend, which will be perfected 
in His true house '* for ever." We look in vain 
for another example, even in David's psalms, of 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 43 

such perfect, restful trust in God. These clear 
notes are perhaps the purest utterance ever given 
of " the peace of God which passeth all under- 
standing." 

Such were the thoughts and hopes of the lad 
who kept his father's sheep at Bethlehem. He 
lived a life of lofty thoughts and lowly duties. 
He heard the voice of God amidst the silence of 
the hills, and the earliest notes of his harp 
echoed the deep tones. He learned courage as 
well as tenderness from his daily tasks, and 
patience from the contrast between them and the 
high vocation which Samuel's mysterious anoint- 
ing had opened before him. If we remember 
how disturbing an influence the consciousness of 
it might have wrought in a soul less filled with 
God, we may perhaps accept as probably correct 
the superscription which refers one sweet, simple 
psalm to him, and may venture to suppose that 
it expresses the contentment, undazzled by 
visions of coming greatness, that calmed his 
heart. " Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor 
mine eyes lofty ; neither do I exercise myself in 
great matters, or in things too high for me. 
Surely I have smoothed and quieted my soul : like 
a weanling on his mother's (breast), like a wean- 



44 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

ling is my soul within me." (Psa. cxxxi.) So 
lying in God's arms, and content to be folded in 
His embrace, without seeking anything beyond, 
he is tranquil in his lowly lot 

It does not fall within our province to follow 
the course of the familiar narrative through the 
picturesque events that led him to fame and 
position at court. The double character of 
minstrel and warrior, to which we have already 
referred, is remarkably brought out in his double 
introduction to Saul, once as soothing the king's 
gloomy spirit with the harmonies of his shep- 
herd's harp, once as bringing down the boasting 
giant of Gath with his shepherd's sling. On the 
first occasion his residence in the palace seems 
to have been ended by Saul's temporary recovery. 
He returns to Bethlehem for an indefinite time, 
and then leaves it and all its peaceful tasks for 
ever. The dramatic story of the duel with 
Goliath needs no second telling. His arrival at 
the very crisis of the war, the eager courage with 
which he leaves his baggage in the hands of the 
guard and runs down the valley to the ranks of 
the army, the busy hum of talk among the 
Israelites, the rankling jealousy of his brother 
that curdles into bitter jeers, the modest courage 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 45 

with which he offers himself as champion, 
the youthful enthusiasm of brave trust in '' the 
Lord, that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, 
and out of the paw of the bear ;" the wonderfully 
vivid picture of the young hero with his shep- 
herd staff in one hand, his sling in the other, 
and the rude wallet by his side, which had 
carried his simple meal, and now held the 
smooth stone from the brook that ran between 
the armies in the bottom of the little valley — 
the blustering braggadocio of the big champion, 
the boy s devout confidence in '' the name of the 
Lord of hosts ; " the swift brevity of the narra- 
tive of the actual fight, which in its hurrying 
clauses seems to reproduce the light-footed 
eagerness of the young champion, or the rapid 
whizz of the stone ere it crashed into the thick 
forehead ; the prostrate bulk of the dead giant 
prone upon the earth, and the conqueror, slight 
and agile, hewing off the huge head with Go- 
liath's own useless sword ; — all these incidents, 
so full of character, so antique in manner, 
so weighty with lessons of the impotence of 
strength that is merely material, and the pow e 
of a living enthusiasm of faith in God, may, for 
our present purposes, be passed with a mere 



46 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

glance. One observation may, however, be 
allowed. After the victory, Saul is represented 
as not knowing who David was, and as sending 
Abner to find out where he comes from. Abner, 
too, professes entire ignorance ; and when 
David appears before the king, " with the head 
of the Philistine in his hand," he is asked, 
" Whose son art thou, young man ? " It has 
been thought that here we have an irreconcilable 
contradiction with previous narratives, according 
to which there was close intimacy between him 
and the king, who " loved him greatly," and 
gave him an office of trust about his person. 
Suppositions of '' dislocation of the narrative," 
the careless adoption by the compiler of two 
separate legends, and the like, have been freely 
indulged in. But it may at least be suggested 
as a possible explanation of the seeming dis- 
crepancy, that when Saul had passed out of his 
moody madness it is not w^onderful that he 
should have forgotten all which had occurred in 
his paroxysm. It is surely a common enough 
psychological phenomenon that a man restored 
to sanity has no remembrance of the events 
during his mental aberration. And as for 
Abner's profession of ignorance, an incipient 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 47 

jealousy of this stripling hero may naturally 
have made the ^'captain of the host" willing to 
keep the king as ignorant as he could concern- 
ing a probable formidable rival. There is no 
need to suppose he was really ignorant, but only 
that it suited him to say that he was. 

With this earliest deed of heroism the peace- 
ful private days are closed, and a new epoch of 
court favour and growing popularity begins. 
The impression which the whole story leaves 
upon one is well summed up in a psalm which 
the Septuagint adds to the Psalter. It is not 
found in the Hebrew, and has no pretension to 
be David's work ; but, as a resiime of the salient 
points of his early life, it may fitly end our con- 
siderations of this first epoch. 

" This is the autograph psalm of David, and 
beyond the number (/.^., of the psalms in the 
Psalter), when he fought the single fight with 
Goliath : — 

*' (i.) I was little among my brethren, and the 
youngest in the house of my father : I kept the 
flock of my father. (2.) My hands made a pipe, 
my fingers tuned a psaltery. (3.) And who 
shall tell it to my Lord 1 He is the Lord, He 
shall hear me. (4.) He sent His angel (mes- 



48 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

senger), and took me from the flocks of my 
father, and anointed me with the oil of His 
anointing. (5.) But my brethren were fair and 
large, and in them the Lord took not pleasure. 
(6.) I went out to meet the Philistine, and he 
cursed me by his idols. (7.) But I, drawing his 
sword, beheaded him, and took away reproach 
from the children of Israel." 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 49 



IV.— THE EXILE. 

DAVID'S first years at the court of Saul in 
Gibeah do not appear to have produced 
any psalms which still survive. 

** The sweetest songs are those 
Which tell of saddest thought." 

It was natural, then, that a period full of novelty 
and of prosperous activity, very unlike the quiet 
days at Bethlehem, should rather accumulate 
materials for future use than be fruitful in 
actual production. The old life shut to behind 
him for ever, like some enchanted door in a hill- 
side, and an unexplored land lay beckoning 
before. The new was widening his experience, 
but it had to be mastered, to be assimilated by 
meditation before it became vocal. 

The bare facts of this section are familiar and 
soon told. There is first a period in which he 
is trusted by Saul, who sets him in high com- 
mand, with the approbation not only of the 
people, but even of the official classes. TBut a 

D 



50 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

new dynasty resting on military pre-eminence 
cannot afford to let a successful soldier stand on 
the steps of the throne ; and the shrill chant of 
the women out of all the cities of Israel, which 
even in Saul's hearing answered the praises of 
his prowess with a louder acclaim for David's 
victories, startled the king for the first time with 
a revelation of the national feeling. His un- 
slumbering suspicion "eyed David from that 
day." Rage and terror threw him again into 
the gripe of his evil spirit, and in his paroxysm 
he flings his heavy spear, the symbol of his 
royalty, at the lithe harper, with fierce vows of 
murder. The failure of his attempt to kill 
David seems to have aggravated his dread of 
him as bearing a charm which won all hearts 
and averted all dangers. A second stage is 
marked not only by Saul's growing fear, 
but by David's new position. He is removed 
from court, and put in a subordinate command, 
which only extends his popularity, and brings 
him into more immediate contact with the mass 
of the people. "All Israel and Judah loved 
David, because he went out and came in before 
them." Then follows the offer of Saul's elder 
daughter in marriage, in the hope that by play- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 5 1 

ing upon his gratitude and his reHgious feeling, 
he might be urged to some piece of rash bravery 
that would end him without scandal. Some new 
caprice of Saul's, however, leads him to insult 
David by breaking his pledge at the last 
moment, and giving the promised bride to 
another. Jonathan's heart was not the only one 
in Saul's household that yielded to his spell. 
The younger Michal had been cherishing his 
image in secret, and now tells her love. Her 
father returns to his original purpose, with the 
•strange mixture of tenacity and capricious 
changefulness that marks his character, and 
again attempts, by demanding a grotesquely 
savage dowry, to secure David's destruction. 
But that scheme, too, fails ; and he becomes a 
member of the royal house. 

This third stage is marked by Saul's deepen- 
ing panic hatred, which has now become a fixed 
idea. All his attempts have only strengthened 
David's position, and he looks on his irresistible 
advance with a nameless awe. He calls, with 
a madman's folly, on Jonathan and on all his 
servants to kill him; and then, when his son 
appeals to him, his old better nature comes over 
him, and with a great oath he vows that David 



52 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

shall not be slain. For a short time David 
returns to Gibeah, and resumes his former 
relations with Saul, but a new victory over the 
Philistines rouses the slumbering jealousy. Again 
the "evil spirit" is upon him, and the great 
javelin is flung with blind fury, and sticks 
quivering in the wall. It is night, and David 
flies to his house. A stealthy band of assassins 
from the palace surround the house with orders 
to prevent all egress, and, by what may be 
either the strange whim of a madman, or the 
cynical shamelessness of a tyrant, to slay him 
in the open daylight. Michal, who, though in 
after time she showed a strain of her father's 
proud godlessness, and an utter incapacity of 
understanding the noblest parts of her husband's 
character, seems to have been a true wife in 
these early days, discovers, perhaps with a 
woman's quick eye sharpened by love, the 
crouching murderers, and with rapid prompti- 
tude urges immediate flight. Her hands let 
him down from the window — the house being 
probably on the wall. Her ready wit dresses 
up one of those mysterious teraphim (which 
appear to have had some connection with 
idolatry or magic, and which are strange pieces 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 53 

of furnitureTor David's house), and lays it in the 
bed to deceive the messengers, and so gain a 
little more time before pursuit began. " So 
David fled and escaped, and came to Samuel to 
Ramah," and thus ended his life at court. 

Glancing over this narrative, one or two points 
come prominently forth. The worth of these 
events to David must have lain chiefly in the 
abundant additions made to his experience of 
life, which ripened his nature, and developed 
new powers. The meditative life of the sheep- 
fold is followed by the crowded court and camp. 
Strenuous work, familiarity with men, constant 
vicissitude, take the place of placid thought, of 
calm seclusion, of tranquil days that knew no 
changes but the alternation of sun and stars, 
storm and brightness, green pastures and dusty 
paths. He learned the real world, with its 
hate and effort, its hollow fame and its whisper- 
ing calumnies. Many illusions no doubt faded, 
but the light that had shone in his solitude still 
burned before him for his guide, and a deeper 
trust in his Shepherd God was rooted in his 
soul by all the shocks of varying fortune. The 
passage from the visions of youth and the soli- 
tary resolves of early and uninterrupted piety to 



54 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

the naked realities of a wicked world, and the 
stern self-control of manly godliness, is ever pain- 
ful and perilous. Thank God ! it may be made 
clear gain, as it was by this young hero psalmist. 
David's calm indifference to outward circum- 
stances affecting himself, is very strikingly ex- 
pressed in his conduct. Partly from his poetic 
temperament, partly from his sweet natural 
unselfishness, and chiefly from his living trust in 
God, he accepts whatever happens with equa- 
nimity, and makes no effort to alter it. He 
originates nothing. Prosperity comes unsought, 
and dangers unfeared. He does not ask for 
Jonathan's love, or the people's favour, or the 
women's songs, or Saul's daughter. If Saul 
gives him command he takes it, and does his 
work. If Saul flings his javelin at him, he 
simply springs aside and lets it whizz past. If 
his high position is taken from him, he is quite 
content with a lower. If a royal alliance is 
offered, he accepts it ; if it is withdrawn, he is 
not ruffled ; if renewed, he is still willing. If a 
busy web of intrigue is woven round him, he 
takes no notice. If reconciliation is proposed, 
he cheerfully goes back to the palace. If his 
life is threatened he goes home. He will not stir 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 55 

to escape but for the urgency of his wife. So 
well had he already begun to learn the worth- 
lessness of life's trifles. So thoroughly does he 
practice his own precept, " Fret not thyself 
because of evil-doers ; " '' rest in the Lord, and 
wait patiently for Him." (Psa. xxxvii. i, 7.) 

This section gives also a remarkable impres- 
sion of the irresistible growth of his popularity 
and influence. The silent energy of the Divine 
purpose presses his fortunes onward with a 
motion slow and inevitable as that of a glacier. 
The steadfast flow circles unchecked round, or 
rises victorious over all hindrances. Efforts to 
ruin, to degrade, to kill — one and all fail. 
Terror and hate, suspicion and jealousy, only 
bring him nearer the goal. A clause which 
comes in thrice in the course of one chapter, 
expresses this fated advance. In the first stage 
of his court life, we read, " David prospered " 
(i Sam. xviii. 5, margin), and again with in- 
creased emphasis it is told as the result of the 
efforts to crush him, that, "He prospered in all 
his ways, and the Lord was with him " (verse 
14), and yet again, in spite of Saul's having 
"become his enemy continually," he " prospered 
more than all the servants of Saul " (verse 30). 



56 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

He moves onward as stars in their courses 
move, obeying the equable impulse of the calm 
and conquering will of God. 

The familiar Scripture antithesis, which natu- 
rally finds its clearest utterance in the words of 
the last inspired writer — namely, the eternal 
opposition of Light and Darkness, Love and 
Hate, Life and Death, is brought into sharpest 
relief by the juxtaposition and contrast of David 
and Saul. This is the key to the story. The 
two men are not more unlike in person than in 
spirit. We think of the one with his ruddy 
beauty and changeful eyes, and lithe slight form, 
and of the other gaunt and black, his giant 
strength weakened, and his " goodly " face 
scarred with the lightnings of his passions — and 
as they look so they are. The one full of joy- 
ous energy, the other devoured by gloom ; the 
one going in and out among the people and 
winning universal love, the other sitting moody 
and self-absorbed behind his palace walls ; the 
one bringing sweet clear tones of trustful praise 
from his harp, the other shaking his huge spear 
in his madness ; the one ready for action and 
prosperous in it all, the other paralyzed, shrink- 
ing from all work, and leaving the conduct of 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 57 

the war to the servant whom he feared ; the one 
conscious of the Divine presence making him 
strong and calm, the other writhing in the gripe 
of his evil spirit, and either foaming in fury, or 
stiffened into torpor ; the one steadily growing 
in power and favour with God and man, the 
other sinking in deeper mire, and wrapped 
about with thickening mists as he moves to his 
doom. The tragic pathos of these two lives in 
their fateful antagonism is the embodiment of 
that awful alternative of life and death, blessing 
and cursing, which it was the very aim of 
Judaism to stamp ineffaceably on the con- 
science. 

David's flight begins a period to which a large 
number of his psalms are referred. We may 
call them "The Songs of the Outlaw." The 
titles in the psalter connect several with specific 
events during his persecution by Saul, and 
besides these, there are others which have 
marked characteristics in common, and may 
therefore be regarded as belonging to the same 
time. The bulk of the former class are found in 
the second book of the psalter (Ps. xlii. — Ixxii.), 
which has been arranged with some care. There 
are first eight Korahite psalms, and one of 



58 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

Asaph's ; then a group of fifteen Davidic (li. — 
Ixv.), followed by two anonymous; then three 
more of David's (Ixviii. — Ixx.), followed by one 
anonymous and the well-known prayer *'for 
Solomon." Now it is worth notice that the 
group of fifteen psalms ascribed to David is as 
nearly as possible divided in halves, eight having 
inscriptions which give a specific date of com- 
position, and seven having no such detail. 
There has also been some attempt at arranging 
the psalms of these two classes alternately, but 
that has not been accurately carried out. These 
facts show that the titles are at all events as old 
as the compilation of the second book of the 
psalter, and were regarded as accurate then. 
Several points about the complete book of 
psalms as we have it, seem to indicate that these 
two first books were an older nucleus, which was 
in existence long prior to the present collection 
— and if so, the date of the titles must be carried 
back a very long way indeed, and with a pro- 
portionate increase of authority. 

Of the eight psalms in the second book 
having titles with specific dates, five (Ps. 
Hi., liv., Ivi., Ivii., lix.) are assigned to the 
period of the Sauline persecution, and, as it 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 59 

would appear, with accuracy. There is a 
general similarity of tone in them all, as well 
as considerable parallelisms of expression, fa- 
vourite phrases and metaphors, which are favour- 
able to the hypothesis of a nearly cotempo- 
raneous date. They are all in what, to use a 
phrase from another art, we may call David's 
earlier manner. For instance, in all the psalmist 
is surrounded by enemies. They would "swallow 
him up" (Ivi. I, 2; Ivii. 3). They ''oppress" 
him (liv. 3; Ivi. i). One of their weapons is 
calumny, which seems from the frequent refer- 
ences to have much moved the psalmist. Their 
tongues are razors (Hi. 2), or swords (Ivii. 4 ; 
lix. 7 ; Ixiv. 3). They seem to him like crouch- 
ing beasts ready to spring upon harmless prey 
(Ivi. 6 ; Ivii. 6 ; Hx. 3) ; they are "lions" (Ivii. 4), 
dogs (lix. 6, 14). He is conscious of nothing 
which he has done to provoke this storm of 
hatred (lix. 3 ; Ixiv. 4.) The "strength" of God 
is his hope (liv. i ; lix. 9, 17). He is sure that 
retribution will fall upon the enemies (Hi. 5 ; 
liv. 5; Ivi. 7; Ivii. 6; lix. 8 — 15; Ixiv. 7, 8). 
He vows and knows that psalms of deliverance 
will yet succeed these plaintive cries (Hi. 9 ; 
liv. 7 ; Ivi. 12 ; Ivii. 7 — 11 ; Hx. 16, 17;. 



6o THE LIFE OF DAVID 

We also find a considerable number of psalms 
in the first book of the psalter which present 
the same features, and may therefore probably 
be classed with these as belonging to the time 
of his exile. Such for instance are the seventh 
and thirty-fourth, which have both inscriptions 
referring them to this period, with others which 
we shall have to consider presently. The 
imagery of the preceding group reappears in 
them. His enemies are lions (vii. 2 ; xvii. 12 ; 
(xxii. 13; XXXV. 17); dogs (xxii. 16); bulls 
xxii. 12). Pitfalls and snares are in his path 
(vii. 15; xxxi. 4; XXXV. 7). He passionately 
protests his innocence, and the kindliness of his 
heart to his wanton foes (vii. 3 — 5 ; xvii. 3, 4) ; 
whom he has helped and sorrowed over in their 
sickness (xxxv. 13, 14) — a reference, perhaps, to 
his solacing Saul in his paroxysms with the 
music of his harp. He dwells on retribution 
with vehemence (vii. 11 — 16; xi. 5 — 7; xxxi. 
23 ; xxxv. 8), and on his own deliverance with 
confidence. 

These general characteristics accurately cor- 
respond with the circumstances of David during 
the years of his wanderings. The scenery and 
life of the desert colours the metaphors which 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 6 I 

describe his enemies as wild beasts ; himself as 
a poor hunted creature amongst pits and snares ; 
or as a timid bird flying to the safe crags, and 
God as his Rock. Their strong assertions of 
innocence accord with the historical indications 
of Saul's gratuitous hatred, and appear to dis- 
tinguish the psalms of this period from those of 
Absalom's revolt, in which the remembrance of 
his great sin was too deep to permit of any such 
claims. In like manner the prophecies of the 
enemies' destruction are too triumphant to suit 
that later time of exile, when the father's heart 
yearned with misplaced tenderness over his 
worthless son, and nearly broke with unkingly 
sorrow for the rebel's death. Their confidence 
in God, too, has in it a ring of joyousness in 
peril which corresponds with the buoyant faith 
that went with him through all the desperate 
adventures and hairbreadth escapes of the 
Sauline persecution. If then we may, with some 
confidence, read these psalms in connection with 
that period, what a noble portraiture of a brave, 
devout soul looks out upon us from them. We 
see him in the first flush of his manhood — 
somewhere about five-and-twenty years old — 
fronting perils of which he is fully conscious, 



62 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

with calm strength and an enthusiasm of trust 
that hfts his spirit above them all, into a region 
of fellowship with God which no tumult can in- 
vade, and which no remembrance of black trans- 
gression troubled and stained. His harp is his 
solace in his wanderings ; and while plaintive 
notes are flung from its strings, as is needful for 
the deepest harmonies of praise here, every wail- 
ing tone melts into clear ringing notes of glad 
affiance in the " God of his m.ercy/' 

Distinct references to the specific events of 
his wanderings are, undoubtedly, rare in them, 
though even these are more obvious than has 
been sometimes carelessly assumed. Their in- 
frequency and comparative vagueness has been 
alleged against the accuracy of the inscriptions 
which allocate certain psalms to particular occa- 
sions. But in so far as it is true that these allu- 
sions are rare and inexact, the fact is surely 
rather in favour of than against the correctness 
of the titles. For if these are not suggested by 
obvious references in the psalms to which they 
are affixed, by what can they have been sug- 
gested but by a tradition considerably older 
than the compilation of the psalter ? Besides, 
the analogy of all other poetry would lead us to 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 63 

expect precisely what we find in these psalms 
— general and not detailed allusions to the 
writer's circumstances. The poetic imagination 
does not reproduce the bald prosaic facts which 
have set it in motion, but the echo of them 
broken up and etherealised. It broods over 
them till life stirs, and the winged creature 
bursts from them to sing and soar. 

If we accept the title as accurate, the fifty- 
ninth psalm is the first of these Songs of the 
Outlaw. It refers to the time "when Saul sent, 
and they watched the house to kill him." Those 
critics who reject this date, which they do on 
very weak grounds, lose themselves in a chaos 
of assumptions as to the occasion of the psalm. 
The Chaldean invasion, the assaults in the time 
of Nehemiah, and the era of the Maccabees, are 
alleged with equal confidence and equal ground- 
lessness. " We believe that it is most advisable 
to adhere to the title, and most scientific to 
ignore these hypotheses built on nothing." 
(Delitzsch.) 

It is a devotional and poetic commentary on 
the story in Samuel. There we get the bare 
facts of the assassins prowling by night round 
David's house ; of Michal's warning ; of her 



64 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

ready-witted trick to gain time, and of his hasty 
flight to Samuel at Ramah. In the narrative 
David is, as usual at this period, passive and 
silent ; but when we turn to the psalm, we learn 
the tone of his mind as the peril bursts upon 
him, and all the vulgar craft and fear fades from 
before his lofty enthusiasm of faith. 

The psalm begins abruptly with a passionate 
cry for help, which is repeated four times, thus 
bringing most vividly before us the extremity 
of the danger and the persistency of the sup- 
pliant's trust. The peculiar tenderness and 
closeness of his relation to his heavenly Friend, 
which is so characteristic of David's psalms, and 
which they were almost the first to express, 
breathes through the name by which he invokes 
help, " my God." The enemies are painted in 
words which accurately correspond with the 
history, and which by their variety reveal how 
formidable they were to the psalmist. They 
" lie in wait (literally weave plots) for my life." 
They are " workers of iniquity," '' men of blood," 
insolent or violent ('' mighty " in English ver- 
sion). He asserts his innocence, as ever in these 
Sauline psalms, and appeals to God in confirma- 
tion, "not for my transgressions, nor for my 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 65 

Sins, O Lord." He sees these eager tools of 
royal malice hurrying to their congenial work : 
" they run and prepare themselves." And then, 
rising high above all encompassing evils, he 
grasps at the throne of God in a cry, which 
gains additional force when we remember that 
the would-be murderers compassed his house in 
the night. " Awake to meet me, and behold ; " 
as if he had said, " In the darkness do Thou see ; 
at midnight sleep not Thou." The prayer is 
continued in words which heap together with 
unwonted abundance the Divine names, in each 
of which lie an appeal to God and a pillar of 
faith. As Jehovah, the self-existent Fountain 
of timeless Being ; as the God of Hosts, the 
Commander of all the embattled powers of the 
universe, whether they be spiritual or material ; 
as the God of Israel, who calls that people His, 
and has become theirs — he stirs up the strength 
of God to " awake to visit all the heathen," — a 
prayer which has been supposed to compel the 
reference of the whole psalm to the assaults of 
Gentile nations, but which may be taken as an 
anticipation on David's lips of the truth that, 
" They are not all Israel which are of Israel." 
After a terrible petition — " Be not merciful to 

E 



66 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

any secret plotters of evil " — there is a pause 
(Selah) to be filled, as it would appear, by some 
chords on the harp, or the blare of the trumpets, 
thus giving time to dwell on the previous peti- 
tions. 

But still the thought of the foe haunts him, 
and he falls again to the lower level of painting 
their assembling round his house, and their 
whispers as they take their stand. It would 
appear that the watch had been kept up for 
more than one night. How he flings his grow- 
ing scorn of them into the sarcastic words, 
" They return at evening ; they growl like a dog, 
and compass the city '' (or " go their rounds in 
the city "). One sees them stealing through the 
darkness, like the troops of vicious curs that 
infest Eastern cities, and hears their smothered 
threatenings as they crouch in the shadow of 
the unlighted streets. Then growing bolder, as 
the night deepens and sleep falls on the silent 
houses : "Behold they pour out with their mouth, 
swords (are) in their lips, for *who hears' ?'' In 
magnificent contrast with these skulking mur- 
derers fancying themselves unseen and unheard, 
David's faith rends the heaven, and, with a 
daring image which is copied in a much later 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 67 

psalm (ii. 4), shows God gazing on them with 
Divine scorn which breaks in laughter and 
mockery. A brief verse, which recurs at the end 
of the psalm, closes the first portion of the 
psalm with a calm expression of untroubled 
trust, in beautiful contrast with the peril 
and tumult of soul, out of which it rises 
steadfast and ethereal, like a rainbow spanning 
a cataract. A slight error appears to have crept 
into the Hebrew text, which can be easily 
corrected from the parallel verse at the end ; 
and then the quiet confident words are — 

" My strength ! upon Thee will I wait, 
For God is my fortress ! '^ 

The second portion is an intensification of 
the first ; pouring out a terrible prayer for exem- 
plary retribution on his enemies ; asking that no 
speedy destruction may befall them, but that 
God would first of all '' make them reel " by the 
blow of His might ; would then fling them pros- 
trate ; would make their pride and fierce words 
a net to snare them; and then, at last, would 
bring them to nothing in the hot flames of His 
wrath — that the world may know that He is king. 
The picture of the prowling dogs recurs with 



68 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

deepened scorn and firmer confidence that they 
will hunt for their prey in vain. 

" And they return at evening ; they growl like a dog, 
And compass the city. 
They — they prowl about for food 
If (or, since) they are not satisfied, they spend the 
night (in the search.) " 

There is almost a smile on his face as he 
thinks of their hunting about for him, like 
hungry hounds snuffing for their meal in the 
kennels, and growling now in disappointment — 
while he is safe beyond their reach. And the 
psalm ends with a glad burst of confidence, 
and a vow of praise very characteristic on his 
lips — 

^^ But I — I will sing Thy power, 
And shout aloud, in the morning, Thy mercy, 
For Thou hast been a fortress for me. 
And a refuge in the day of my trouble. 
My strength ! unto Thee will I harp, 
For God is my fortress — the God of my mercy." 

Thrice he repeats the vow of praise. His harp 
was his companion in his flight, and even in the 
midst of peril the poet's nature appears which 
regards all life as materials for song, and the 
devout spirit appears which regards all trial as 
occasions for praise. He has calmed his own 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 69 

spirit, as he had done Saul's, by his song, and by 
prayer has swung himself clear above fightings 
and fears. The refrain, which occurs twice in 
the psalm, witnesses to the growth of his faith 
even while he sings. At first he could only say 
in patient expectance, " My strength ! I will 
wait upon thee, for God is my fortress." But at 
the end his mood is higher, his soul has caught 
fire as it revolves, and his last w^ords are a 
triumphant amplification of his earlier trust : 
*' My strength ! unto thee will I sing with the 
harp — for God is my fortress — the God of my 
mercy." 



70 THE LIFE OF DAVID 



v.— THE EXILE— coNTiNi/£D. 

" OO David fled, and escaped and came to 
>^ Samuel to Ramah, and told him all that 
Saul had done unto him. And he and Samuel 
went and dwelt in Naioth " (i Sam. xix. i8) — 
or, as the word probably means, in the collection 
of students' dvv^ellings, inhabited by the sons of 
the prophets, where possibly there may have 
been some kind of right of sanctuary. Driven 
thence by Saul's following him, and having had 
one last sorrowful hour of Jonathan's companion- 
ship — the last but one on earth — he fled to 
Nob, whither the ark had been carried after the 
destruction of Shiloh. The story of his flight 
had not reached the solitary little town among 
the hills, and he is received with the honour due 
to the king's son-in-law. He pleads urgent 
secret business for Saul as a reason for his 
appearance with a slender retinue, and unarmed ; 
and the priest, after some feeble scruples, supplies 
the handful of hungry fugitives with the shew- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 7 I 

bread. But David's quick eye caught a swarthy 
face peering at him from some enclosure of the 
simple forest sanctuary, and as he recognised 
Doeg the Edomite, Saul's savage herdsman, a 
cold foreboding of evil crept over his heart, and 
made him demand arms from the peaceful 
priest. The lonely tabernacle was guarded by 
its own sanctity, and no weapons were there, 
except one trophy which was of good omen to 
David — Goliath's sword. He eagerly accepts 
the matchless w^eapon which his hand had 
clutched on that day of danger and deliverance, 
and thus armed, lest Doeg should try to bar his 
flight, he hurries from the pursuit which he knew 
that the Edomiite's malignant tongue would 
soon bring after him. The tragical end of the 
unsuspecting priest's kindness brings out the 
furious irrational suspicion and cruelty of Saul. 
He rages at his servants as leagued with David 
in words which have a most dreary sound of 
utter loneliness sighing through all their fierce 
folly : " All of you have conspired against me ; 
there is none of you that is sorry for me " (i 
Sam. xxii. 8.) Doeg is forward to curry favour 
by telling his tale, and so tells it as to suppress 
the priest's ignorance of David's flight, and to 



72 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

represent him as aiding and comforting the 
rebel knowingly. Then fierce wrath flames out 
from the darkened spirit, and the whole priestly- 
population of Nob are summoned before him, 
loaded with bitter reproaches, their professions 
of innocence disregarded, and his guard ordered 
to murder them all then and there. The very 
soldiers shrink from the sacrilege, but a willing 
tool is at hand. The wild blood of Edom, fired 
by ancestral hatred, desires no better work, and 
Doeg crowns his baseness by slaying — with the 
help of his herdsmen, no doubt — " on that day 
fourscore and five persons that did wear an 
ephod," and utterly extirpating every living 
thing from the defenceless little city. 

One psalm, the fifty-second, is referred by its 
inscription to this period, but the correspond- 
ence between the history and the tone of the 
psalm is doubtful. It is a vehement rebuke and 
a prophecy of destruction directed against an 
enemy, whose hostility was expressed in "devour- 
ing words." The portrait does not apply very 
accurately to the Doeg of the historical books, 
inasmuch as it describes the psalmist's enemy 
as " a mighty mxan," — or rather as " a hero," and 
as trusting " in the abundance of his riches," — 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 73 

and makes the point of the reproach against 
him that he is a confirmed liar. But the 
dastardly deed of blood may be covertly alluded 
to in the bitterly sarcastic ^^ hero " — as if he had 
said, " O brave warrior, who dost display thy 
prowess in murdering unarmed priests and 
women ? " And Doeg's story to Saul was a 
lie in so far as it gave the impression of the 
priests' complicity with David, and thereby 
caused their deaths on a false charge. The 
other features of the description are not con- 
trary to the narrative, and most of them are 
in obvious harmony with it. The psalm, then, 
may be taken as showing how deeply David's 
soul was stirred by the tragedy. He pours out 
broken words of hot and righteous indignation : 

'* Destructions doth thy tongue devise, 
Like a razor whetted — O thou worker of deceit." 

•K- -H- * -K- -;f * 

** Thou lovest all words that devour :* O thou deceitful tongue ! " 

He prophesies the destruction of the cruel liar, 
and the exultation of the righteous when he 
falls, in words which do indeed belong to the 
old covenant of retribution, and yet convey an 
eternal truth which modern sentimentalism finds 

" Literally, *' words of swallowing up." 



74 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

very shocking, but which is witnessed over and 
over again in the relief that fills the heart of 
nations and of individuals when evil men fade : 
"When the wicked perish, there is shout- 
ing ''— 

* ' Also God shall smite thee down for ever, 
Will draw thee out, ^ and carry thee away from the tent, 
And root thee out of the land of the living ; 
And the righteous shall see and fear, 
And over him shall they laugh." 

In confident security he opposes his own happy 
fellowship with God to this dark tragedy of 
retribution : 

'* But I — (I am) like a green olive tree in the house of God." 

The enemy was to be " rooted out ; " the 
psalmist is to flourish by derivation of life and 
vigour from God. If Robinson's conjecture 
that Nob was on the Mount of Olives were 
correct (which is very doubtful), the allusion 
here would gain appropriateness. As the olives 
grew all round the humble forest sanctuary, 
and were in some sort hallowed by the shrine 
which they encompassed, so the soul grows and 
is safe in loving fellowship with God. Be that 

'^ The full force of the word is, " will pluck out as a glowing 
ember from a hearth " (Delitzsch). 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 75 

as it may, the words express the outlaw's 
serene confidence that he is safe beneath the 
sheltering mercy of God, and re-echo the hopes 
of his earlier psalm, " I will dwell in the house 
of the Lord for ever." The stormy indigna- 
tion of the earlier verses passes away into 
calm peace and patient waiting in praise and 
trust : 

* I will praise Thee for ever, for Thou hast done (it), 
And wait on Thy name in the presence of Thy beloved, for 
it is good." 

Hunted from Nob, David wnth a small com- 
pany struck across the country in a south- 
westerly direction, keeping to the safety of the 
tangled mountains, till, from the western side 
of the hills of Judah, he looked down upon the 
broad green plain of Philistia. Behind him was a 
mad tyrant, in front the uncircumcised enemies 
of his country and his God. His condition was 
desperate, and he had recourse to desperate 
measures. That nearest Philistine city, some 
ten miles off, on which he looked down from 
his height, was Gath ; the glen where he had 
killed its champion was close beside him, — 
every foot of ground was familiar by many a 
foray and many a fight. It was a dangerous 



76 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

resource to trust himself in Gath, with Goliath's 
sword dangling in his belt. But he may have 
hoped that he was not known by person, or 
may have thought that Saul's famous com- 
mander would be a welcome guest, as a banished 
man, at the Philistine court. So he made the 
plunge, and took refuge in Goliath's city. Dis- 
covery soon came, and in the most ominous 
form. It was an ugly sign that the servants 
of Achish should be quoting the words of the 
chant of victory which extolled him as the 
slayer of their countryman. Vengeance for his 
death was but too likely to come next. The 
doubts of his identity seem to have lasted for 
some little time, and to have been at first 
privately communicated to the king. They 
somehow reached David, and awoke his watch- 
ful attention, as well as his fear. The depth 
of his alarm and his ready resource are shown 
by his degrading trick of assumed madness — 
certainly the least heroic action of his life. 
What a picture of a furious madman is the 
description of his conduct when Achish's ser- 
vants came to arrest him. He "twisted himself 
about in their hands " in the feigned contortions 
of possession; he drummed on the leaves of 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 77 

the gate,* and "let his spittle run down into 
his beard.'' (i Sam. xxi. 13.) Israelitish quick- 
ness gets the better of Philistine stupidity, as 
it had been used to do from Sampson's time 
onwards, and the dull-witted king falls into the 
trap, and laughs away the suspicions with a 
clumsy joke at his servants' expense about 
more madmen being the last thing he was 
short of. A hasty flight from Philistine terri- 
tory ended this episode. 

The fifty-sixth psalm, which is referred by its 
title to this period, seems at first sight to be in 
strange contrast with the impressions drawn 
from the narrative, but on a closer examination 
is found to confirm the correctness of the reference 
by its contents. The terrified fugitive, owing 
his safety to a trick, and slavering like an idiot 
in the hands of his rude captors, had an inner 
life of trust strong enough to hold his mortal 
terror in check, though not to annihilate it. 
The psalm is far in advance of the conduct — is 
it so unusual a circumstance as to occasion sur- 

* The Septuagint appears to have followed a different read- 
ing here from that of our present Hebrew text, and the change 
adds a very picturesque clause to the description. A madman 
would be more likely to hammer than to "scrabble" on the 
great double-leaved gate. 



78 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

prise, that lofty and sincere utterances of faith 
and submission should co-exist with the op- 
posite feelings ? Instead of taking the contrast 
between the words and the acts as a proof that 
this psalm is wrongly ascribed to the period in 
question, let us rather be thankful for another 
instance that imperfect faith may be genuine, 
and that if we cannot rise to the height of un- 
wavering fortitude, God accepts a tremulous 
trust fighting against mortal terror, and grasping 
with a feeble hand the word of God, and the 
memory of all his past deliverances. It is pre- 
cisely this conflict of faith and fear which the 
psalm sets before us. It falls into three portions, 
the first and second of which are closed by a 
kind of refrain (vers. 4, 10, 11) — a structure 
which is characteristic of several of these 
Sauline persecution psalms {e.g.^ Ivii. S, 11 ; lix. 
9, 17). The first part of each of these two 
portions is a vivid description of his danger, 
from which he rises to the faith expressed in 
the closing words. The repetition of the same 
thoughts in both is not to be regarded as a cold 
artifice of composition, but as the true expres- 
sion of the current of his thoughts. He sees his 
enemies about him, ready to swallow him up — 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 79 

''there be many fighting against me disdain- 
fully "* (ver. 2). Whilst the terror creeps round 
his heart ("he was sore afraid," i Sam. xxi. 12), 
he rouses himself to trust, as he says, in words 
which express most emphatically the co-existence 
of the two, and carry a precious lesson of the 
reality of even an interrupted faith, streaked with 
many a black line of doubt and dread. 

" (In) the day (that) I am afraid— I trust on Thee." 

And then he breaks into the utterance of praise 
and confidence — to which he has climbed by the 
ladder of prayer. 

" In God I praise His word, 
In God I trust, I do not fear : — 
What shall flesh do to me ? " 

How profoundly these words set forth the 
object of his trust, as being not merely the 
promise of God — which in David's case may be 
the specific promise conveyed by his designation 
to the throne — but the God who promises, the 
inmost nature of that confidence as being a 
living union with God, the power of it as grapp- 

^ Literally, "loftily." Can there be any allusion to the giant 
stature of Goliath's relations in Gath ? We hear of four men 
" born to the giant in Gath," who were killed in David's wars. 
(2 Sara. xxi. 22.) 



8o THE LIFE OF DAVID 

ling with his dread, and enabling him now to 
say, " I do not fear." 

But again he falls from this height ; another 
surge of fear breaks over him, and almost washes 
him from his rock. His foes, with ceaseless 
malice, arrest his words ; they skulk in ambush, 
they dog his heels, they long for his life. The 
crowded clauses portray the extremity of the 
peril and the singer's agitation. His soul is still 
heaving with the ground swell of the storm, 
though the blasts come more fitfully, and are 
dying into calm. He is not so afraid but that 
he can turn to God ; he turns to Him because 
he is afraid, like the disciples in later days, who 
had so much of terror that they must awake 
their Master, but so much of trust that His 
awaking was enough. He pleads with God, as 
in former psalms, against his enemies, in words 
which go far beyond the occasion, and connect 
his own deliverance with the judgments of God 
over the whole earth. He plaintively recalls his 
homelessness and his sorrows in words which 
exhibit the characteristic blending of hope and 
pain, and which are beautifully in accordance 
with the date assigned to the psalm. ''My 
wanderings dost Thou, even Thou, number.'* 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 8 1 

He IS not alone in these weary flights from 
Gibeah to Ramah, from Ramah to Nob, from 
Nob to Gath, from Gath he knows not whither. 
One friend goes with him through them all. 
And as the water-skin was a necessary part of 
a traveller's equipment, the mention of his wan- 
derings suggests the bold and tender metaphor 
of the next clause, "Put my tears in Thy bottle," 
— a prayer for that very remembrance of his 
sorrows, in the existence of which he immedi- 
ately declares his confidence — " Are they not in 
Thy book?" The true office of faithful com- 
munion with God is to ask for, and to appro- 
priate, the blessings which in the very act become 
ours. He knows that his cry will scatter his 
foes, for God is for him. And thus once again 
he has risen to the height of confidence where 
for a moment his feet have been already planted, 
and again — but this time with even fuller 
emphasis, expressed by an amplification which 
introduces for the only time in the psalm the 
mighty covenant name — he breaks into his 
triumphant strain — 

" In God I praise the Word ; 
In JEHOVAH I praise the Word ; 
In God I trust, I do not fear : — 
What shall man do to me ? " 
F 



82 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

And from this mood of trustful expectation he 
does not again decline. Prayer has brought its 
chiefest blessing — the peace that passeth under- 
standing. The foe is lost to sight, the fear 
conquered conclusively by faith ; the psalm 
which begins with a plaintive cry, ends in praise 
for deliverance, as if it had been already 
achieved — 

" Thou hast delivered my life from death, 
(Hast Thou) not (delivered) my feet from faUing, 
That I may walk before God in the light of the living ?'' 

He already reckons himself safe ; his question 
is not an expression of doubt, but of assurance ; 
and he sees the purpose of all God's dealings 
with him to be that the activities of life may all 
be conducted in the happy consciousness of His 
eye who is at once Guardian and Judge of His 
children. How far above his fears and lies has 
this hero and saint risen by the power of sup- 
plication and the music of his psalm ! 

David naturally fled into Israelitish territory 
from Gath. The exact locality of the cave 
Adullam, where we next find him, is doubtful ; 
but several strong reasons occur for rejecting 
the monkish tradition which places it away to 
the east, in one of the wild wadies which run 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 83 

down from Bethlehem to the Dead Sea. We 
should expect it to be much more accessible by 
a hasty march from Gath. Obviously it would 
be convenient for him to hang about the frontier 
of Philistia and Israel, that he might quickly 
cross the line from one to the other, as dangers 
appeared. Further, the city of Adullam is 
frequently mentioned, and always in connections 
which fix its site as on the margin of the great 
plain of Philistia, and not far from Gath. 
(2 Chron. xi. 7, etc.) There is no reason to 
suppose that the cave of Adullam was in a 
totally different district from the city. The 
hills of Dan and Judah, which break sharply 
down into the plain within a few miles of Gath, 
are full of "extensive excavations," and there, 
no doubt, we are to look for the rocky hold, 
where he felt himself safer from pursuit, and 
whence he could look down over the vast sweep 
of the rich Philistine country. Gath lay at his 
feet, close by was the valley where he had killed 
Goliath, the scenes of Samson's exploits were 
all about him. Thither fled to him his whole 
family, from fear, no doubt, of Saul's revenge 
falling on them ; and there he gathers his band 
of four hundred desperate men, whom poverty 



84 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

and misery, and probably the king's growing 
tyranny, drove to flight. They were wild, 
rough soldiers, according to the picturesque 
description, " whose faces were like the faces of 
lions, and were as swift as the roes upon the 
mountains." They were not freebooters, but 
seem to have acted as a kind of frontier-guard 
against southern Bedouins and western Philis- 
tines for the sheep-farmers of the border whom 
Saul's government was too weak to protect. 
In this desultory warfare, and in eluding the 
pursuit of Saul, against whom it is to be observed 
David never employed any weapon but flight, 
several years were passed. The efi*ect of such 
life on his spiritual nature was to deepen his 
unconditional dependence on God ; by the 
alternations of heat and cold, fear and hope, 
danger and safety, to temper his soul and make 
it flexible, tough and bright as steel. It evolved 
the qualities of a leader of men ; teaching him 
command and forbearance, promptitude and 
patience, valour and gentleness. It won for 
him a name as the defender of the nation, as 
Nabal's servant said of him and his men, " They 
were a wall unto us, both by night and by day " 
(i Sam. XXV. 16). And it gathered round him 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 85 

a force of men devoted to him by the en- 
thusiastic attachment bred from long years of 
common dangers, and the hearty friendships of 
many a march by day, and nightly encamp- 
ment round the glimmering watchfires, beneath 
the lucid stars. 



86 THE LIFE OF DAVID 



VI.— THE Y.'KYLE— CONTINUED. 

WE have one psalm which the title con- 
nects with the beginning of David's 
stay at Adullam, — the thirty-fourth. The sup- 
position that it dates from that period throws 
great force into many parts of it, and gives a 
unity to what is else apparently fragmentary 
and disconnected. Unlike those already con- 
sidered, which were pure soliloquies, this is full 
of exhortation and counsel, as would naturally 
be the case if it were written when friends and 
followers began to gather to his standard. It 
reads like a long sigh of relief at escape from a 
danger just past ; its burden is to tell of God's 
deliverance, and to urge to trust in Him. How 
perfectly this tone corresponds to the circum- 
stances immediately after his escape from Gath 
to Adullam need not be more than pointed out. 
The dangers which he had dreaded and the cry 
to God which he had sent forth are still present 
to his mind, and echo through his song, like a 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 87 

subtly-touched chord of sadness, which appears 
for a moment, and is drowned in the waves of 
some triumphant music. 

" I sought the Lord, and He heard me, 
And from all my alarms He delivered me. 
■5f -Jf -K- -^f -x- 

This afflicted (man) cried, and Jehovah heard, 
And from all his troubles He saved him.'^ 

And the " local colouring " of the psalm corre- 
sponds too with the circumstances of Adullam. 
How appropriate, for instance, does the form in 
which the Divine protection is proclaimed be- 
come, when we think of the little band bivouack- 
ing among the cliffs, " The angel of the Lord 
encampeth round about them that fear Him, 
and delivereth them." Like his great ancestor, 
he is met in his desert flight by heavenly guards, 
'* and he calls the name of that place Mahanaim " 
(that is, " two camps "), as discerning gathered 
round his own feeble company the ethereal 
weapons of an encircling host of the warriors 
of God, through whose impenetrable ranks his 
foes must pierce before they can reach him. 
From Samson's time we read of lions in this 
district (Judges xiv. 8, 9), and we may recognise 
another image as suggested by their growls 



88 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

heard among the ravines, and their gaunt forms 
prowhng near the cave. " The young lions do 
lack and suffer hunger ; but they that seek the 
Lord shall not want any good " (ver. lo). 

And then he passes to earnest instructions 
and exhortations, which derive appositeness 
from regarding them as a proclamation to his 
men of the principles on which his camp is to 
be governed. "Come, ye children, hearken 
unto me." He regards himself as charged with 
guiding them to godliness : " I will teach you 
the fear of the Lord." With some remembrance, 
perhaps, of his deception at Gath, he warns 
them to " keep " their " tongues from evil " and 
their ^' lips from speaking guile." They are not 
to be in love with warfare, but, even with their 
swords in their hands, are to "seek peace, and 
pursue it." On these exhortations follow joyous 
assurances of God's watchful eye fixed upon 
the righteous, and His ear open to their cry ; of 
deliverance for his suppliants, whatsoever hard- 
ship and trouble they may have to wade through; 
of a guardianship which " keepeth all the bones " 
of the righteous, so that neither the blows of the 
foe nor the perils of the crags should break them, 
— all crowned with the contrast ever present to 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 89 

David's mind, and having a personal reference 
to his enemies and to himself : 

" Evil shall slay the wicked, 

And the haters of the righteous shall suffer penalty. 
Jehovah redeems the life of His servants, 
And no penalty shall any suffer who trust in Him." 

Such were the counsels and teachings of the 
young leader to his little band, — noble " general 
orders " from a commander at the beginning of 
a campaign ! 

We venture to refer the twenty-seventh psalm 
also to this period. It is generally supposed, 
indeed, by those commentators who admit its 
Davidic authorship, to belong to the time of 
Absalom's rebellion. The main reason for 
throwing it so late is the reference in ver. 4 to 
dweUing in the house of the Lord and inquiring 
in His temple.* This is supposed to require a 
date subsequent to David's bringing up of the 
ark to Jerusalem, and placing it in a temporary 
sanctuary. But whilst longing for the sanctuary 
is no doubt characteristic of the psalms of the 

*^*The fourth verse in its present form 7misi have been 
written after the temple was built." — "The Psalms chrono- 
logically arranged," p. 68 — following Ewald, in whose im- 
perious criticism that same naked " must have been," works 
wonders. 



90 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

later wanderings, it is by no means necessary to 
suppose that in the present case that desire, 
which David represents as the longing of his 
life, was a desire for mere bodily presence in a 
material temple. Indeed, the very language 
seems to forbid such an interpretation. Surely 
the desire for an abode in the house of the Lord 
— which was his one wish, which he longed to 
have continuous throughout all the days of his 
life, which was to surround him with a privacy 
of protection in trouble, and to be as the 
munitions of rocks about him — was something 
else than a morbid desire for an impossible 
seclusion in the tabernacle, — a desire fitter for 
some sickly mediaeval monarch who buried his 
foolish head and faint heart in a monastery than 
for God's Anointed. We have seen an earlier 
germ of the same desire in the twenty-third 
psalm, the words of which are referred to here ; 
and the interpretation of the one is the inter- 
pretation of the other. The psalmist breathes 
his longing for the Divine fellowship, which 
shall be at once vision, and guidance, and 
hidden life in distress, and stability, and victory, 
and shall break into music of perpetual praise. 
If, then, we are not obliged by the words in 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 9 I 

question to adopt the later date, there is much 
in the psalm which strikingly corresponds with 
the earlier, and throws beautiful illustration on 
the psalmist's mood at this period. One 
such allusion we venture to suppose in the 
words (ver. 2), 

" When the wicked came against me to devour my flesh, 
My enemies and my foes, — they stumbled and fell ; " 

which have been usually taken as a mere general 
expression, without any allusion to a specific 
event. But there was one incident in David's 
life which had been forced upon his remembrance 
by his recent peril at Gath — his duel with 
Goliath, which exactly mieets the very peculiar 
language here. The psalm employs the same 
word as the narrative, which tells how the 
Philistine " arose, and came, and drew near to 
David." The braggart boast, " I will give ''thy 
flesh unto the fowls of the air and the beasts of 
the fields," is echoed in the singular phrase of 
the psalm ; and the emphatic, rapid picture, 
"they stumbled and fell," is at once a remin- 
iscence of the hour when the stone crashed 
through the thick forehead, " and he fell upon 
his face to the earth ; " and also a reference to 
an earlier triumph in Israel's history, celebrated 



92 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

with fierce exultation in the wild chant which 
rolls the words like a sweet morsel under the 
tongue, as it tells of Sisera — 

" Between her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay ; 
Between her feet he bowed, he fell ; 
Where he bowed, there he fell down dead." 

Another autobiographical reference in the 
psalm has been disputed on insufficient grounds : 

" For my father and my mother forsake me, 
And Jehovah takes me up.'' (Ver. lo.) 

It is, at all events, a remarkable coincidence 
that the only mention of his parents after the 
earliest chapters of his life falls in precisely with 
this period of the history, and is such as might 
have suggested these words. We read (i Sam. 
xxii. 3, 4) that he once ventured all the way 
from Adullam to Moab to beg an asylum from 
Saul's indiscriminate fury for his father and 
mother, who were no doubt too old to share his 
perils, as the rest of his family did. Having 
prepared a kindly welcome for them, perhaps on 
the strength of the blood of Ruth the Moabitess 
in Jesse's veins, he returned to Bethlehem, 
brought the old couple away, and guarded them 
safely to their refuge. It is surely most natural 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 93 

to suppose that the psalm is the lyrical echo of 
that event, and most pathetic to conceive of the 
psalmist as thinking of the happy home at 
Bethlehem now deserted, his brothers lurking 
with him among the rocks, and his parents 
exiles in heathen lands. Tears fill his eyes, but 
he lifts them to a Father that is never parted 
from him, and feels that he is no more orphaned 
nor homeless. 

The psalm is remarkable for the abrupt 
transition of feeling which cleaves it into two 
parts ; one (vers, i- — 6) full of jubilant hope and 
enthusiastic faith, the other (vers. 7 — 14) a lowly 
cry for help. There is no need to suppose, with 
some critics, that we have here two independent 
hymns bound together in error. He must have 
little knowledge of the fluctuations of the de- 
vout life who is surprised to find so swift a 
passage from confidence to conscious weakness. 
Whilst the usual order in the psalms, as the 
usual order in good men's experience, is that 
prayer for deliverance precedes praise and 
triumph, true communion with God is bound 
to no mechanical order, and may begin with 
gazing on God, and realizing the mysteries of 
beauty in His secret place, ere it drops to earth. 



94 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

The lark sings as it descends from the '^ privacy 
of glorious light " to its nest in the stony furrows 
as sweetly, though more plaintively, than whilst 
it circles upwards to the sky. It is perhaps a 
nobler effect of faith to begin with God and hymn 
the victory as if already won, than to begin with 
trouble and to call for deliverance. But with 
whichever we commence, the prayer of earth must 
include both ; and so long as we are weak, and 
God our strength, its elements must be " suppli- 
cation and thanksgiving." The prayer of our 
psalm bends round again to its beginning, and 
after the plaintive cry for help breaks once more 
into confidence (vers. 13, 14). The psalmist 
shudders as he thinks what ruin would have be- 
fallen him if he had not trusted in God, and leaves 
the unfinished sentence, — as a man looking 
down into some fearful gulf starts back and 
covers his eyes, before he has well seen the bot- 
tom of the abyss. 

" If I had not believed to see the goodness of the Lord 
in the land of the living ! " 

Then rejoicing to remember how even by his 
feeble trust he has been saved, he stirs up him- 
self to a firmer faith, in words which are them- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 95 

selves an exercise of faith, as well as an incite- 
ment to it : 

" Wait on Jehovah ! 
Courage ! and let thy heart be strong ! 
Yea ! wait on Jehovah ! " 

Here is the true highest type of a troubled soul's 
fellowship with God, when the black fear and 
consciousness of weakness is inclosed in a golden 
ring of happy trust. Let the name of our God 
be first upon our lips, and the call to our way- 
ward hearts to wait on Him be last, and then we 
may between think of our loneliness, and feeble- 
ness, and foes, and fears, without losing our hold 
of our Father's hand. 

David in his rocky eyrie was joyful, because 
he began with God. It was a man in real peril 
who said, " The Lord is my light and my salva- 
tion, whom shall I fear ? " It was at a critical 
pause in his fortunes, when he knew not yet 
whether Saul's malice was implacable, that he 
said, " Though war should rise against me, in 
this will I be confident." It was in thankful- 
ness for the safe hiding-place among the dark 
caverns of the hills that he celebrated the 
dwelling of the soul in God with words coloured 
by his circumstances, "In the secret of His 



96 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

tabernacle shall He hide me ; He shall set me 
up upon a rock.'* It was with Philistia at his 
feet before and Saul's kingdom in arms behind 
that his triumphant confidence was sure that 
** Now shall mine head be lifted up above mine 
enemies round about me." It was in weakness, 
not expelled even by such joyous faith, that he 
plaintively besought God's mercy, and laid 
before His mercy-seat as the mightiest plea His 
own inviting words, " Seek ye My face," and His 
servant's humble response, " Thy face. Lord, 
will I seek." Together, these made it impos- 
sible that that Face, the beam.s of which are 
light and salvation, should be averted. God's 
past comes to his lips as a plea for a present 
consistent with it and with His own mighty 
name. "Thou hast been my help; leave me 
not, neither forsake me, O God of my salva- 
tion." His loneliness, his ignorance of his road, 
and the enemies who watch him, and, like a 
later Saul, " breathe out cruelty " (see Acts ix. i), 
become to him in his believing petitions, not 
grounds of fear, but arguments with God ; and 
having thus m.astered all that was distressful in 
his lot, by making it all the basis of his cry for 
help, he rises again to hope, and stirs up him- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 97 

self to lay hold on God, to be strong and bold, 
because his expectation is from Him. A noble 
picture of a steadfast soul ; steadfast not because 
of absence of fears and reasons for fear, but 
because of presence of God and faith in Him. 

Having abandoned Adullam, by the advice of 
the prophet Gad, who from this time appears to 
have been a companion till the end of his reign 
(2 Sam. xxiv. 11), and who subsequently be- 
came his biographer (i Chron. xxix. 29), he 
took refuge, as outlaws have ever been wont 
to do, in the woods. In his forest retreat, some- 
where among the now treeless hills of Judah, he 
heard of a plundering raid made by the Philis- 
tines on one of the unhappy border towns. 
The marauders had broken in upon the mirth 
of the threshing-floors with the shout of battle, 
and swept away the year's harvest. The 
banished man resolved to strike a blow at 
the ancestral foes. Perhaps one reason may 
have been the wish to show that, outlaw as he 
was, he, and not the morbid laggard at Gibeah, 
who was only stirred to action by mad jealousy, 
was the sword of Israel. The little band bursts 
from the hills on the spoil-encumbered Philis- 
tines, recaptures the cattle which like moss- 

G 



98 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

troopers they were driving homewards from the 
ruined farmsteads, and routs them with great 
slaughter. But the cowardly townspeople of 
Keilah had less gratitude than fear ; and the 
king's banished son-in-law was too dangerous 
a guest, even though he was of their own tribe, 
and had delivered them from the enemy. Saul, 
who had not stirred from his moody seclusion 
to beat back invasion, summoned a hasty 
muster, in the hope of catching David in the 
little city, like a fox in his earth: and the 
cowardly citizens meditated saving their homes 
by surrendering their champion. David and 
his six hundred saved themselves by a rapid 
flight, and, as it would appear, by breaking up 
into detachments. " They went whithersoever 
they could go" (i Sam. xxiii. 13) ; whilst David, 
with some handful, made his way to the inhos- 
pitable wilderness which stretches from the hills 
of Judah to the shores of the Dead Sea, and 
skulked there in '' lurking places " among the 
crags and tangled underwood. With fierce per- 
severance " Saul sought him every day, but 
God delivered him not into his hand." One 
breath of love, fragrant and strength-giving, was 
wafted to his fainting heart, when Jonathan 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 99 

found his'way^vhere Saul could not come, and 
the two friends met once more. In the wood- 
land solitudes they plighted their faith again, 
and the beautiful unselfishness of Jonathan is 
wonderfully set forth in his words, " Thou shalt 
be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto 
thee ; " while an awful glimpse is given into 
that mystery of a godless will consciously 
resisting the inevitable, when there is added, 
" and that also Saul, my father, knoweth." In 
such resistance the king's son has no part, for it 
is pointedly noticed that he returned to his 
house. Treachery, and that from the men of 
his own tribe, again dogs David's steps. The 
people of Ziph, a small place on the edge of 
the southern desert, betray his haunt to Saul. 
The king receives the intelligence with a burst 
of thanks, in which furious jealousy and per- 
verted religion, and a sense of utter loneliness 
and misery, and a strange self-pity, are mingled 
most pathetically and terribly : '' Blessed be ye 
of the Lord, for ye have compassion on me ! " 
He sends them away to mark down his prey ; 
and when they have tracked him to his lair, he 
follows with his force and posts them round the 
hill where David and his handful lurk. The 



TOO THE LIFE OF DAVID 

little band try to escape, but they are surrounded 
and apparently lost. At the very moment 
when the trap is just going to close, a sudden 
messenger, "fiery red with haste," rushes into 
Saul's army with news of a formidable invasion : 
*' Haste thee and come ; for the Philistines have 
spread themselves upon the land ! " So the 
eager hand, ready to smite and crush, is plucked 
back ; and the hour of deepest distress is the 
hour of deliverance. 

At some period in this lowest ebb of David's 
fortunes, we have one short psalm, very simple 
and sad (liv.) It bears the title, '" When the 
Ziphims came and said to Saul, Doth not David 
hide himself with us.^" and may probably be 
referred to the former of the two betrayals by 
the men of Ziph. The very extremity of peril 
has made the psalmist still and quiet. The sore 
need has shortened his prayer. He is too sure 
that God hears to use many words ; for it is 
distrust, not faith, which makes us besiege His 
throne with much speaking. He is confident as 
ever ; but one feels that there is a certain self- 
restraint and air of depression over the brief 
petitions, which indicate the depth of his distress 
and the uneasiness of protracted anxiety. Two 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. lOI 

notes only sound from his harp : one a plaintive 
cry for help; the other, thanksgiving for deliver- 
ance as already achieved. The two are bound 
together by the recurrence in each of "the name" 
of God, which is at once the source of his sal- 
vation and the theme of his praise. We have 
only to read the lowly petitions to feel that 
they speak of a spirit somewhat weighed down 
by danger, and relaxed from the loftier mood of 
triumphant trust. 

(i) O God, by Thy name save me, 

And in Thy strength do judgment for me. 

(2) O God, hear my prayer, 

Give ear to the words of my mouth. 

(3) For strangers are risen against me, 
And tyrants seek my hfe. 

They set not God before them. 

The enemies are called "strangers;" but, as 
we have seen in the first of these songs of the 
exile, it is not necessary, therefore, to suppose 
that they were not Israelites. The Ziphites 
were men of Judah like himself; and there is 
bitter emphasis as well as a gleam of insight 
into the spiritual character of the true Israel in 
calling them foreigners. The other name, op- 
pressors, or violent men, or, as we have rendered 



I02 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

it, tyrants, corresponds too accurately with the 
character of Saul in his later years, to leave 
much doubt that it is pointed at him. If so, 
the softening of the harsh description by the use 
of the plural is in beautiful accordance with the 
forgiving leniency which runs through all David's 
conduct to him. Hard words about Saul him- 
self do not occur in the psalms. His counsellors, 
his spies, the liars who calumniated David to 
him, and for their own ends played upon his 
suspicious nature, — the tools who took care that 
the cruel designs suggested by themselves should 
be carried out, kindle David's wrath, but it 
scarcely ever lights on the unhappy monarch 
whom he loved with all-enduring charity while 
he lived, and mourned with magnificent eulogy 
when he died. The allusion is made all the more 
probable, because of the verbal correspondence 
with the narrative which records that " Saul was 
come out to seek his life" (i Sam. xxiii. 15.) 

A chord or two from the harp permits the 
mind to dwell on the thought of the foes, and 
prepares for the second part of this psalm. In 
it thanksgiving and confidence flow from the 
petitions of the former portion. But the praise 
is not so jubilant, nor the trust so victorious, 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. IO3 

as we have seen them. " The peace of God " 
has come in answer to prayer, but it is some- 
what subdued : 

" Behold, God is my helper ; 
The Lord is the supporter of my life/^ 

The foes sought his Hfe, but, as the historical 
book gives the antithesis, "Saul sought him 
every day, but God delivered him not into his 
hand." The rendering of the English version, 
" The Lord is with them that uphold my soul," 
is literally accurate, but does not convey the 
meaning of the Hebrew idiom. God is not 
regarded as one among many helpers, but as 
alone the supporter or upholder of his life. 
Believing that, the psalmist, of course, believes 
as a consequence that his enemies will be 
smitten with evil for their evil. The prophetic 
lip of faith calls things that are not as though 
they were. In the midst of his dangers he looks 
forward to songs of deliverance and glad sacri- 
fices of praise ; and the psalm closes with words 
that approach the more fervid utterances we 
have already heard, as if his song had raised his 
own spirit above its fears : 

(6) With willinghood will I sacrifice unto Thee. 
I will praise Thy name for it is good. 



I04 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

(7) For from all distress it has delivered me. 

And on my enemies will mine eye see (my desire). 

The name — the revealed character of God — was 
the storehouse of all the saving energies to 
which he appealed in verse i. It is the theme 
of his praise when the deliverance shall have 
come. It is almost regarded here as equivalent 
to the Divine personality — it is good, it has 
delivered him. Thus, we may say that this 
brief psalm gives us as the single thought of a 
devout soul in trouble, the name of the Lord, 
and teaches by its simple pathos how the con- 
templation of God as He has made Himself 
known, should underlie every cry for help and 
crown every thanksgiving ; whilst it may assure 
us that whosoever seeks for the salvation of that 
mighty name may, even in the midst of trouble, 
rejoice as in an accomplished deliverance. And 
all such thoughts should be held with a faith at 
least as firm as the ancient psalmist's, by us to 
whom the " name " of the Lord is " declared " 
by Him who is the full revelation of God, and 
the storehouse of all blessings and help to his 
"brethren." (Heb. ii. 12.) 

A little plain of some mile or so in breadth 
slopes gently down towards the Dead Sea about 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. IO5 

the centre of its western shore. It is girdled 
round by savage cliffs, which, on the northern 
side, jut out in a bold headland to the water's 
edge. At either extremity is a stream flowing 
down a deep glen choked with luxurious vege- 
tation ; great fig-trees, canes, and maiden-hair 
ferns covering the rocks. High up on the hills 
forming its western boundary a fountain sparkles 
into light, and falls to the flat below in long 
slender threads. Some grey weathered stones 
mark the site of a city that was old when 
Abraham wandered in the land. Traces of the 
palm forests which, as its name indicates, were 
cleared for its site (Hazezon Tamar, The palm- 
tree clearing) have been found, encrusted with 
limestone, in the warm, damp gullies, and ruined 
terraces for vineyards can be traced on the bare 
hill-sides. But the fertility of David's time is 
gone, and the precious streams nourish only a 
jungle haunted by leopard and ibex. This is 
the fountain and plain of Engedi (the fount of 
the wild goat), a spot which wants but industry 
and care to make it a little paradise. Here 
David fled from the neighbouring wilderness, 
attracted no doubt by the safety of the deep 
gorges and rugged hills, as well as by the 



I06 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

abundance of water in the fountain and the 
streams. The picturesque and touching episode 
of his meeting with Saul has made the place 
for ever memorable. There are many excava- 
tions in the rocks about the fountain, which may 
have been the cave — black as night to one look- 
ing inward with eyes fresh from the blinding 
glare of sunlight upon limestone, but holding a 
glimmering twilight to one looking outwards with 
eyes accustomed to the gloom — in the innermost 
recesses of which David lay hid while Saul tar- 
ried in its mouth. The narrative gives a graphic 
picture of the hurried colloquy among the little 
band, when summary revenge was thus unex- 
pectedly put within their grasp. The fierce re- 
tainers whispered their suggestion that it would 
be " tempting providence " to let such an oppor- 
tunity escape ; but the nobler nature of David 
knows no personal animosity, and in these 
earliest days is flecked by no cruelty nor lust of 
blood. He cannot, however, resist the tempta- 
tion of showing his power and almost parading 
his forbearance by stealing through the dark- 
ness and cutting away the end of Saul's long 
robe. It was little compared with what he 
could as easily have done — smite him to the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. IO7 

heart as he crouched there defenceless. But it 
was a coarse practical jest, conveying a rude in- 
sult, and the quickly returning nobleness of his 
nature made him ashamed of it, as soon as he 
had clambered back with his trophy. He felt 
that the sanctity of Saul's office as the anointed 
of the Lord should have saved him from the 
gibe. The king goes his way all unawares, and, 
as it would seem, had not regained his men, 
when David, leaving his band (very much out of 
temper no doubt at his foolish nicety), yields to 
a gush of ancient friendship and calls loudly 
after him, risking discovery and capture in his 
generous emotion. The pathetic conversation 
which ensued is eminently characteristic of 
both men, so tragically connected and born to 
work woe to one another. David's remonstrance 
(i Sam. xxiv. 9 — 15) is full of nobleness, of 
wounded affection surviving still, of conscious 
rectitude, of solemn devout appeal to the judg- 
ment of God. He has no words of reproach 
for Saul, no weak upbraidings, no sullen anger, 
no repaying hate with hate. He almost pleads 
with the unhappy king, and yet there is nothing 
undignified or feeble in his tone. The whole is 
full of correspondences, often of verbal identity, 



I08 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

with the psalms which we assign to this period. 
The calumnies which he so often complains of 
in these are the subject of his first words to 
Saul, whom he regards as having had his heart 
poisoned by lies : " Wherefore hearest thou 
men's words, saying. Behold ! David seeketh 
thy hurt." He asserts absolute innocence of 
anything that warranted the king's hostility, 
just as he does so decisively in the psalms. 
'' There is neither evil nor transgression in my 
hand, and I have not sinned against thee." As 
in them he so often compares himself to some 
wild creature pursued Hke the goats in the cliffs 
of Engedi, so he tells Saul, " Thou huntest my 
life to take it." And his appeal from earth's 
slanders, and misconceptions, and cruelties, to 
the perfect tribunal of God, is couched in lan- 
guage, every clause of which may be found in 
his psalms. "The Lord, therefore, be judge, 
and judge between me and thee, and see, and 
plead my cause, and deliver me out of thy 
hand." 

The unhappy Saul again breaks into a passion 
of tears. With that sudden flashing out into 
vehement emotion so characteristic of him, and 
so significant of his enfeebled self-control, he 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. lOQ 

recognises David's generous forbearance and its 
contrast to his own conduct. For a moment, at 
all events, he sees, as by a lightning flash, the 
mad hopelessness of the black road he is tread- 
ing in resisting ^the decree that has made his 
rival king — and he binds him by an oath to 
spare his house when he sits on the throne. The 
picture moves awful thoughts and gentle pity 
for the poor scathed soul writhing in its hope- 
lessness and dwelling in a great solitude of fear, 
but out of which stray gleams of ancient noble- 
ness still break ; — and so the doomed man goes 
back to his gloomy seclusion at Gibeah, and 
David to the free life of the mountains and the 
wilderness. 



1 lO THE LIFE OF DAVID 



VII.— THE EXILE— coNTiNi/ED. 

THERE are many echoes of this period of 
Engedi in the Psalms. Perhaps the most 
distinctly audible of these are to be found in 
the seventh psalm, which is all but universally 
recognised as David's, even Ewald concurring 
in the general consent. It is an irregular ode — 
for such is the meaning of Shiggaion in the 
title, and by its broken rhythms and abrupt 
transitions testifies to the emotion of its author. 
The occasion of it is said to be " the words of 
Cush the Benjamite." As this is a peculiar 
name for an Israelite, it has been supposed to 
be an allegorical designation for some historical 
person, expressive of his character. We might 
render it '^the negro.'' The Jewish commen- 
tators have taken it to refer to Saul himself, 
but the bitter tone of the psalm, so unlike 
David's lingering forbearance to the man whom 
he never ceased to love, is against that supposi- 
tion. Shimei the Benjamite, whose foul tongue 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I I I 

cursed him in rabid rage, as he fled before 
Absalom, has also been thought of, but the 
points of correspondence with the earlier date 
are too numerous to make that reference tenable. 
It seems better to suppose that Cush "the 
black " was one of Saul's tribe, who had been 
conspicuous among the calumniators of whom 
we have seen David complaining to the king. 
And if so, there is no period in the Sauline per- 
secution into which the psalm will fit so naturally 
as the present. Its main thoughts are precisely 
those which he poured out so passionately in 
his eager appeal when he and Saul stood face 
to face on the solitary hill side. They are 
couched in the higher strain of poetry indeed, 
but that is the only difference ; whilst there are 
several verbal coincidences, and at least one 
reference to the story, which seem to fix the 
date with considerable certainty. 

In it we see the psalmist's soul surging with 
the ground swell of strong emotion, which 
breaks into successive waves of varied feeling — 
first (vers, i, 2) terror blended with trust, the 
enemy pictured, as so frequently in these early 
psalms, as a lion who tears the flesh and breaks 
the bones of his prey — and the refuge in God 



I I 2 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

described by a graphic word very frequent also 
in the cotemporaneous psalms (xi. i ; Ivii. i,etc.). 
Then with a quick turn comes the passionate 
protestation of his innocence, in hurried words, 
broken by feeling, and indignantly turning 
away from the slanders which he will not speak 
of more definitely than calling them " this." 

(3) Jehovah, my God ! if I have done this — 
If there^be iniquity in my hands — 

(4) If I have rewarded evil to him that was at peace with 

me — 
Yea, I delivered him that without cause is mine 
enemy — 

(5) May the enemy pursue my soul and capture it, 
And trample down to the earth my life. 

And my glory in the dust may he lay ! 

How remarkably all this agrees with his 
words to Saul, " There is neither evil nor trans- 
gression in my hand, .... yet thou huntest 
my soul to take it" (i Sam. xxiv. 11) ; and how 
forcible becomes the singular reiteration in the 
narrative, of the phrase "my hand," which 
occurs six times in four verses. The peculiarly 
abrupt introduction in ver. 4 of the clause, ^' I 
delivered him that without cause is mine enemy," 
which completely dislocates the grammatical 
structure, is best accounted for by supposing 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I I 3 

that David's mind is still full of the temptation 
to stain his hands with Saul's blood, and is 
vividly conscious of the effort which he had had 
to make to overcome it. And the solemn 
invocation of destruction which he dares to 
address to Jehovah his God includes the familiar 
figure of himself as a fugitive before the hunters, 
which is found in the words already quoted, 
and which here as there stands in immediate 
connection with his assertion of clean hands. 

Then follows, with another abrupt turn, a 
vehement cry to God to judge his cause ; his 
own individual case melts into the thought of a 
world-wide judgment, which is painted with 
grand power with three or four broad rapid 
strokes. 

(6) Awake for me — Thou hast commanded judgment. 

(7) Let the assembly of the nations stand round Thee, 
And above it return Thou up on high. 

(8) Jehovah will judge the nations. 

Judge me, O Jehovah, according to my righteousness 
and mine integrity in me ! 

Each smaller act of God's judgment is con- 
nected with the final world-judgment, is a pro- 
phecy of it, is one in principle therewith ; and 
He, who at the last will be known as the 

H 



I 14' THE LIFE OF DAVID 

universal Judge of all, certainly cannot leave 
His servants' cause unredressed nor their cry 
unheard till then. The psalmist is led by his 
own history to realize more intensely that truth 
of a Divine manifestation for judicial purposes 
to the whole world, and his prophetic lip paints 
its solemnities as the surest pledge of his own 
deliverance. He sees the gathered nations 
standing hushed before the Judge, and the 
Victor God at the close of the solemn act 
ascending up on high where He was before, 
above the heads of the mighty crowd (Psalm 
Ixviii. 19). In the faith of this vision, and 
because God will judge the nations, he invokes 
for himself the anticipation of that final triumph 
of good over evil, and asks to be dealt with 
according to his righteousness. Nothing but 
the most hopeless determination to find dif- 
ficulties could make a difficulty of such words. 
David is not speaking of his whole character 
or life, but of his conduct in one specific matter, 
namely, in his relation to Saul. The righteous 
integrity which he calls God to vindicate is 
not general sinlessness nor inward conformity 
with the law of God, but his blamelessness in 
all his conduct to his gratuitous foe. His 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I I 5 

prayer that God would judge him is distinctly- 
equivalent to his often repeated cry for deliver- 
ance, which should, as by a Divine arbitration, 
decide the debate between Saul and him. 
The whole passage in the psalm, with all its 
lyrical abruptness and lofty imagery, is the ex- 
pression of the very same thought which we 
find so prominent in his words to Saul, already 
quoted, concerning God's judging between them 
and delivering David out of Saul's hand. The 
parallel is instructive, not only as the prose 
rendering of the poetry in the psalm, explaining 
it beyond the possibility of misunderstanding, 
but also as strongly confirmatory of the date 
which we have assigned to the latter. It is so 
improbable as to be almost inconceivable that 
the abrupt disconnected themes of the psalm 
should echo so precisely the whole of the argu- 
ments used in the remonstrance of the historical 
books, and should besides present verbal re- 
semblances and historical allusions to these, 
unless it be of the same period, and therefore 
an inlet into the mind of the fugitive as he 
lurked among the rugged cliffs by *' the fountain 
of the wild goat." 

In that aspect the remainder of the psalm is 



I I 6 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

very striking and significant We have two 
main thoughts in it — that of God as punishing 
evil in this life, and that of the self-destruction 
inherent in all sin ; and these are expressed with 
such extraordinary energy as to attest at once 
the profound emotion of the psalmist, and his 
familiarity with such ideas during his days of 
persecution. It is noticeable, too, that the 
language is carefully divested of all personal 
reference ; he has risen to the contemplation of 
a great law of the Divine government, and at 
that elevation the enemies whose calumnies and 
cruelties had driven him to God fade into insig- 
nificance. 

With what magnificent boldness he paints 
God the Judge arraying Himself in His armour 
of destruction ! 

(ii God is a righteous Judge, 

And a God (who is) angry every day. 

(12) If he (/.^., the evil-doer) turn not, He whets His 

sword, 
His bow He has bent, and made it ready. 

(13) And for him He has prepared weapons of death, 
His arrows He has made blazing darts. 

Surely there is nothing grander in any poetry 
than this tremendous image, smitten out with so 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I I 7 

few strokes of the chisel, and as true as it is 
grand. The representation applies to the facts 
of life, of which as directed by a present Provi- 
dence, and not of any future retribution, David 
is here thinking. Among these facts is chastise- 
ment falling upon obstinate antagonism to God. 
Modern ways of thinking shrink from such re- 
presentations ; but the whole history of the 
world teems with confirmation of their truth — 
only what David calls the flaming arrows of 
God, men call " the natural consequences of 
evil.'' The later revelation of God in Christ 
brings into greater prominence the disciplinary 
character of all punishment here, but bates no 
jot of the intensity with which the earlier revela- 
tion grasped the truth of God as a righteous 
Judge in eternal opposition to, and aversion 
from, evil. 

With that solemn picture flaming before his 
inward eye, the prophet-psalmist turns to gaze 
on the evil-doer who has to bear the brunt of 
these weapons of light. Summoning us to look 
with him by a " Behold ! " he tells his fate in an 
image of frequent occurrence in the psalms of 
this period, and very natural in the lips of a 
man wandering in the desert among wild 



I 1 8 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

creatures, and stumbling sometimes into the 
traps dug for them : " He has dug a hole and 
hollowed it out, and he falls into the pitfall he 
is making." The crumbling soil in which he 
digs makes his footing on the edge more pre- 
carious with every spadeful that he throws out, 
and at last, while he is hard at work, in he 
tumbles. It is the conviction spoken in the 
proverbs of all nations, expressed here by David 
in a figure drawn from life — the conviction that 
all sin digs its own grave and is self-destructive. 
The psalm does not proclaim the yet deeper 
truth that this automatic action, by which sin 
sets in motion its own punishment, has a dis- 
ciplinary purpose, so that the arrows of God 
wound for healing, and His armour is really 
girded on for, even while it seems to be against, 
the sufferer. But it would not be difficult to 
show that that truth underlies the whole Old 
Testament doctrine of retribution, and is obvious 
in many of David's psalms. In the present one 
the deliverance of the hunted prey is contem- 
plated as the end of the baffied trapper's fall 
into his own snare, and beyond that the 
psalmist's thoughts do not travel. His own 
safety, the certainty that his appeal to God's 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I I9 

judgment will not be in vain, fill his mind ; 
and without following the fate of his enemy 
further, he closes this song of tumultuous and 
varied emotion with calm confidence and a vow 
of thanksgiving for a deliverance which is al- 
ready as good as accomplished : 

(17) I will give thanks to Jehovah according to His 
righteousness, 
And I will sing the name of Jehovah, Most High. 

We have still another psalm (Ivii.) which is 
perhaps best referred to this period. According 
to the title, it belongs to the time when David 
" fled from Saul in the cave." This may, of 
course, apply to either Adullam or Engedi, and 
there is nothing decisive to be alleged for 
either ; yet one or two resemblances to psalm 
vii. incline the balance to the latter period. 

These resemblances are the designation of 
his enemies as lions (vii. 2 ; Ivii. 4) ; the image 
of their falling into their own trap (vii. 1 5 ; Ivii. 
6) ; the use of the phrase " my honour " or 
'' glory " for " my soul " (vii. 5 ; Ivii. 8 — the same 
word in the original) ; the name of God as 
'^Most High" (vii. 17; Ivii. 2), an expression 
which only occurs twice besides in the Davidic 
psalms (ix. 2 ; xxi. 7) ; the parallelism in sense 



I20 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

between the petition which forms the centre and 
the close of the one, " Be Thou exalted, O God, 
above the heavens " (Ivii. 5, 11), and that which 
is the most emphatic desire of the other, 
" Arise, O Lord, awake, . . . Hft up Thyself for 
me " (vii. 6). Another correspondence, not pre- 
served in our English version, is the employment 
in both of a rare poetical word, which originally 
means '^ to complete," and so comes naturally 
to have the secondary significations of " to per- 
fect " and " to put an end to." The word in 
question only occurs five times in the Old Testa- 
ment, and always in psalms. Four of these are 
in hymns ascribed to David, of which two are 
(Ivii. 2), ''The God that performetJi all things 
for me," and (vii. 9), '' Let the wickedness of the 
wicked come to an end!' The use of the same 
peculiar word in two such dissimilar connections 
seems to show that it was, as we say, " running 
in his head " at the time, and is, perhaps, a 
stronger presumption of the cotemporaneous- 
ness of both psalms than its employment in both 
with the same application would have been. 

Characteristic of these early psalms is the oc- 
currence of a refrain (compare Ivi. and lix.) 
which in the present instance closes both of the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 2 I 

portions of which the hymn consists. The 
former of these (l — 5) breathes prayerful trust, 
from which it passes to describe the encompass- 
ing dangers ; the second reverses this order, and 
beginning with the dangers and distress, rises 
to ringing gladness and triumph, as though the 
victory were already won. The psalmist's con- 
fident cleaving of soul to God is expressed (ver. 
i) by an image that may be connected with his 
circumstances at Engedi : " In Thee has my 
soul taken refuge." The English version is 
correct as regards the sense, though it oblite- 
rates the beautiful metaphor by its rendering 
"trusteth." The literal meaning of the verb is 
" to flee to a refuge," and its employment here 
may be due to the poetical play of the imagina- 
tion, which likens his secure retreat among the 
everlasting hills to the safe hiding-place which 
his spirit found in God his habitation. A 
similar analogy appears in the earliest use of 
the expression, which may have been floating 
in the psalmist's memory, and which occurs in 
the ancient song of Moses (Deut. xxxii.). The 
scenery of the forty years' wanderings remark- 
ably colours that ode, and explains the frequent 
recurrence in it of the name of God as " the 



122 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

Rock." We have false gods, too, spoken of in 
it, as, " Their rock in whom they took refuge,'* 
where the metaphor appears in its completeness 
(ver. 37). Our psalm goes on with words which 
contain a further allusion to another part of the 
same venerable hymn, "And in the shadow of 
Thy wings will I take refuge," which remind 
us of the grand image in it of God's care over 
Israel, as of the eagle bearing her eaglets on her 
mighty pinions (ver. ii), and point onwards to 
the still more wonderful saying in which all that 
was terrible and stern in the older figure is 
softened into tenderness, and instead of the 
fierce afi*ection of the mother eagle, the hen 
gathering her chickens under her wings becomes 
the type of the brooding love and more than 
maternal solicitude of God in Christ. Nor can 
we forget that the only other instance of the 
figure before David's psalms is in the exquisite 
idyl which tells of the sweet heroism of David's 
ancestress, Ruth, on whose gentle and homeless 
head was pronounced the benediction, " A full 
reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, 
under whose wings thou art come to trust " 
Ruth ii. 12). We may perhaps also see in this 
clause an extension of the simile which unques- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I23 

tionably lies in the verb, and may think of the 
strong "sides of the cave," arching above the 
fugitive like a gigantic pair of wings beneath 
which he nestles warm and dry, while the short- 
lived storm roars among the rocks — a type of 
that broad pinion which is his true defence till 
threatening evils be overpast. In the past he 
has sheltered his soul in God, but no past act of 
faith can avail for present distresses. It must 
be perpetually renewed. The past deliverances 
should make the present confidence more easy ; 
and the true use of all earlier exercises of trust 
is to prepare for the resolve that we will still 
rely on the help we have so often proved. " I 
have trusted in Thee " should ever be followed 
by " And in the shadow of Thy wings will I 
trust." 

The psalmist goes on to fulfil his resolve. 
He takes refuge by prayer in God, whose ab- 
solute elevation above all creatures and circum- 
stances is the ground of his hope, whose faith- 
ful might will accomplish its design, and com- 
plete His servant's lot. '' I will call to God 
Most High ; to God who perfects (His purpose) 
for me." And then assured hope gleams upon 
his soul, and though the storm-clouds hang low 



124 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

and black as ever, they are touched with light. 
" He will send from heaven and save me." But 
even while this happy certainty dawns upon 
him, the contending fears, which ever lurk hard 
by faith, reassert their power, and burst in, 
breaking the flow of the sentence, which by its 
harsh construction indicates the sudden irrup- 
tion of disturbing thoughts. " He that would 
swallow me up reproaches (me)." With this 
two-worded cry of pain — prolonged by the very 
unusual occurrence, in the middle of a verse, of 
the " Selah," which is probably a musical direc- 
tion for the accompaniment — a billow of terror 
breaks over his soul ; but its force is soon spent, 
and the hope, above which for a moment it had 
rolled, rises from the broken spray like some 
pillared light round which the surges dash in 
vain. ''God shall send forth His mercy and 
His truth " — those two white-robed messengers 
who draw nigh to all who call on Him. Then 
follows in broken words, the true rendering of 
which is matter of considerable doubt, a renewed 
picture of his danger : 

(4) (With) my soul — among lions will I lie down. 
Devourers are the sons of men ; 
Their teeth a spear and arrows, 
And their tongue a sharp sword. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 25 

The psalmist seems to have broken off the 
construction, and instead of finishing the sen- 
tence as he began it, to have substituted the 
first person for the third, which ought to have 
followed "my soul." This fragmentary con- 
struction expresses agitation of spirit. It may 
be a question whether the " lions " in the first 
clause are to be regarded as a description of his 
enemies, who are next spoken of without meta- 
phor as sons of men who devour (or who 
" breathe out fire "), and whose words are cutting 
and wounding as spear and sword. The analogy 
of the other psalms of this period favours such 
an understanding of the words. But, on the 
other hand, the reference preferred by Delitzsch 
and others gives great beauty. According to 
that interpretation, the fugitive among the 
savage cliffs prepares himself for his nightly 
slumbers in calm confidence, and lays himself 
down there in the cave, while the wild beasts, 
whose haunt it may have been, prowl without, 
feeling himself safer among them than among 
the more ferocious " sons of men," whose hatred 
has a sharper tooth than even theirs. And then 
this portion of the psalm closes with the refrain, 
" Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens : 



126 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

let Thy glory be above all the earth." A 
prayer that God would show forth His power, 
and exalt His name by delivering His servant. 
What lofty conviction that his cause was God's 
cause, that the Divine honour was concerned in 
his safety, that he was a chosen instrument to 
make known God's praise over all the world ! 
— and what self-forgetfulness in that, even 
whilst he prays for his own deliverance, he 
thinks of it rather as the magnifying of God, 
than as it affects himself personally ! 

The second part continues the closing strain 
of the former, and describes the plots of his foes 
in the familiar metaphor of the pit, into which 
they fall themselves. The contemplation of 
this divine Nemesis on evil-doers leads up to 
the grand burst of thanksgiving with which the 
psalm closes — 

(7) Fixed is my heart, O God ! fixed my heart ! 
I will sing and strike the harp.* 

(8) Awake, my glory ! awake psaltery and harp !t 
I will awake the dawn. 

If the former part may be regarded as the 

* Properly, ''sing with a musical accompaniment." 
t Two kinds of stringed instrument, the difference between 
which is very obscure. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 27 

evening song of confidence, this is the morning 
hymn of thankfulness. He lay down in peace 
among lions; he awakes to praise. He calls upon 
his soul to shake off slumber ; he invokes the 
chords of his harp to arouse from its chamber 
the sleeping dawn. Like a mightier than him- 
self, he will rise a great while before day, and 
the clear notes of the rude lyre, his companion 
in all his wanderings, will summon the morning 
to add its silent speech to His praise. But a 
still loftier thought inspires him. This hunted 
solitary not only knows that his deliverance is 
certain, but he has already the consciousness of 
a world-wide vocation, and anticipates that the 
story of his sorrow and his trust, with the music 
of his psalms, belong to the world, and will flow 
over the barriers of his own generation and of 
his own land into the whole earth — 

(9) I will praise Thee among the peoples, O Lord, 
I will strike the harp to Thee among the nations. 

(10) For great unto the heavens is Thy mercy, 
And to the clouds Thy truth. 

These two mighty messengers of God, whose 
coming he was sure of (ver. 3), will show them- 
selves in his deliverance, boundless and filling 
all the creation. They shall be the theme of his 



128 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

world-wide praise. And then with the repeti- 
tion of the refrain the psalm comes round again 
to supplication, and dies into silent waiting 
before God till He shall be pleased to answer. 
Thus triumphant were the hopes of the lonely 
fugitive skulking in the wilderness ; such bright 
visions peopled the waste places, and made the 
desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. 

The cxlii. is also, according to the title, one 
of the cave-psalms. But considerable doubt 
attaches to the whole group of so-called Davidic 
compositions in the last book of the psalter 
(p. 138 — 144), from their place, and from the fact 
that there are just seven of them, as well as in 
some cases from their style and character. 
They are more probably later hymns in David's 
manner. The one in question corresponds in 
tone with the psalms which we have been con- 
sidering. It breathes the same profound con- 
sciousness of desolation and loneliness : ^^ My 
spirit is darkened within me ; " " Refuge fails 
me, no man cares for my soul." It glows with 
the same ardour of personal trust in and love to 
God which spring from his very loneliness and 
helplessness : " I cry unto Thee, O Jehovah ! I 
say Thou art my refuge and my portion in the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 29 

land of the living." It triumphs with the same 
confidence, and with the same conviction that 
his dehverance concerns all the righteous : 
" They shall crown themselves in me^ for Thou 
hast dealt bountifully with me ; " for such would 
appear to be the true meaning of the word 
rendered in our version " compass me about ; " 
the idea being that the mercy of God to the 
psalmist would become a source of festal glad- 
ness to all His servants, who would bind the 
story of God's bounty to him upon their brows 
like a coronal for a banquet. 



130 THE LIFE OF DAVID 



VIIL~THE EXILE— CONT/Ni/ED. 

AS our purpose in this volume is not a com- 
plete biography, it will not be necessary 
to dwell on the subsequent portions of the exile, 
inasmuch as there is little reference to these in 
the psalms. We must pass over even that ex- 
quisite episode of Abigail, whose graceful 
presence and " most subtle flow of silver-paced 
counsel " soothed David's ruffled spirit, and led 
him captive at once as in a silken leash. The 
glimpse of old-world ways in the story, the 
rough mirth of the shearers, the hint of the kind 
of black mail by which David's little force was 
provided, the snarling humour and garrulous 
crustiness of Nabal, David's fierce blaze of hot 
wrath, the tribute of the shepherds to the kind- 
liness and honour of the outlaws, the rustic 
procession, with the gracious lady last of all, the 
stately courtesy of the meeting, her calm wise 
words — not flattery, yet full of predictions of 
prosperity most pleasant to hear from such lips ; 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I3I 

not rebuke, yet setting in the strongest light 
how unworthy of God's anointed personal venge- 
ance was ; not servile, but yet recognising in 
delicate touches his absolute power over her ; 
not abject, and yet full of supplication, — the 
quick response of David's frank nature and 
susceptible heart, which sweeps away all his 
wrath ; the budding germ of love, which makes 
him break into benedictions on her and her 
wisdom, and thankfulness that he had been kept 
back from "hurting thee',' and the dramatic 
close in their happy union, — all make up one of 
the most charming of the many wonderful idyls of 
Scripture, all fragrant with the breath of love, 
and fresh with undying youth. The story lives 
— alas ! how much longer do words endure than 
the poor earthly affections which they record ! 

After a second betrayal by the men of Ziph, 
and a second meeting with Saul — their last — 
in which the doomed man parts from him with 
blessing and predictions of victory on his un- 
willing lips, David seems to have been driven to 
desperation by his endless skulking in dens and 
caves, and to have seen no hope of continuing 
much longer to maintain himself on the frontier 
and to elude Saul's vigilance. Possibly others 



132 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

than Nabal grudged to pay him for the volunteer 
police which he kept up on behalf of the pastoral 
districts exposed to the wild desert tribes. At 
all events he once more made a plunge into 
Philistine territory, and offers himself and his 
men to the service of the King of Gath. On the 
offer being accepted, the little town of Ziklag 
was allotted to them, and became their home 
for a year and four months. 

To this period of comparative security one 
psalm has been supposed to belong — the xxxi., 
which, in tone and in certain expressions, corre- 
sponds very well with the circumstances. There 
are many similarities in it with the others of the 
same period which we have already considered 
— such, for instance, as the figure of God his rock 
(ver. 3), the net which his enemies have laid for 
him (ver. 4), the allusions to their calumnies and 
slanders (vers. 13, 18), his safe concealment in 
God (ver. 20 : compare xxvii. 5 ; Ivii. i ; xvii. 8, 
etc.), and the close verbal resemblance of ver. 24 
with the closing words of psalm xxvii. The 
reference, however, which has been taken as 
pointing to David's position in Ziklag is that 
contained in the somewhat remarkable words 
(ver. 21): "Blessed be the Lord, for He hath 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 33 

showed me His marvellous loving-kindness in a 
strong city." Of course, the expression may be 
purely a graphic figure for the walls and 
defences of the Divine protection, as, indeed, it 
is usually understood to be. But the general 
idea of the encompassing shelter of God has just 
been set forth in the magnificent imagery of the 
previous verse as the tabernacle, the secret of 
His presence in which He hides and guards His 
servants. And the further language of the 
phrase in question, introduced as it is by a 
rapturous burst of blessing and praise, seems so 
emphatic and peculiar as to make not unnatural 
the supposition of a historical basis in some 
event which had recently happened to the 
psalmist. 

No period of the life will so well correspond 
to such a requirement as the sixteen months of 
his stay in Ziklag, during which he was com- 
pletely free from fear of Saul, and stood high in 
favour with the King of Gath, in whose territory 
he had found a refuge. We may well believe 
that to the hunted exile, so long accustomed to 
a life of constant alarms and hurried flight, the 
quiet of a settled home was very sweet, and 
that behind the rude fortifications of the little 



134 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

town in the southern wilderness there seemed 
security, which made a wonderful contrast to 
their defenceless lairs and lurking-places among 
the rocks. Their eyes would lose their watchful 
restlessness, and it would be possible to lay aside 
their weapons, to gather their households about 
them, and, though they were in a foreign land, 
still to feel something of the bliss of peaceful 
habitudes and tranquil use and wont healing 
their broken lives. No wonder, then, that such 
thankful praise should break from the leader's 
lips ! No wonder that he should regard this 
abode in a fortified city as the result of a miracle 
of Divine mercy ! He describes the tremulous 
despondency which had preceded this marvel of 
loving-kindness in language which at once 
recalls the wave of hopelessness which swept 
across his soul after his final interview with 
Saul, and which led to his flight into Philistine 
territory, " And David said in his heart, I shall 
now perish one day by the hand of Saul" 
(i Sam. xxvii. i). How completely this corre- 
sponds with the psalm, allowance being made 
for the difference between poetry and prose, 
when he describes the thoughts which had 
shaded his soul just before the happy peace of 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 35 

the strong city — '' I said in my haste,* I am cut 
ofif from before Thine eyes ; nevertheless Thou 
heardest the voice of my supplication " (ver. 22). 
And rising, as was ever his manner, from his 
own individual experience to the great truths 
concerning God's care of His children, the 
discovery of which was to him even more pre- 
cious than his personal safety, he breaks forth 
in jubilant invocation, which, as always, is 
full of his consciousness that his life and his 
story belong to the whole household of God — 

(23) O love Jehovah, all ye beloved of Him ! 
The faithful doth J ehovah preserve, 
And plentifully repayeth the proud-doer. 

(24) Courage ! and let your heart be strong, 
All ye that wait for Jehovah ! 

The glow of personal attachment to Jehovah 
which kindles in the trustful words is eminently 
characteristic. It anticipates the final teaching 
of the New Testament in bringing all the rela- 
tions between God and the devout soul down to 
the one bond of love. "We love Him because 
He first loved us," says John. And David has 

* Confusion (Perowne), distrust (Delitzsch), anguish (Ewald), 
trepidation (Calvin). The word literally means to sway back- 
wards and forwards, and hence to be agitated by any emotion, 
principally by fear ; and then, perhaps, to flee in terror. 



136 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

the same discernment that the basis of all must 
be the outgoing of love from the heart of God, 
and that the only response which that seeking 
love requires is the awaking of the echo of its 
own Divine voice in our hearts. Love begets 
love ; love seeks love ; love rests in love. Our 
faith corresponds to His faithfulness, our obedi- 
ence to His command, our reverence to His 
majesty; but our love resembles His, from w^hich 
it draws its life. So the one exhortation is 
" love the Lord," and the ground of it lies in 
that name — "His beloved " — those to whom He 
shows His loving-kindness (ver. 21). 

The closing words remind us of the last verse 
of psalm xxvii. They are distinctly quoted 
from it, with the variation that there the heart- 
ening to' courage was addressed to his own soul, 
and here to " all who wait on the Lord.'* The 
resemblance confirms the reference of both 
psalms to the same epoch, while the difference 
suits the change in his circumstances from a 
period of comparative danger, such as his stay 
at Adullam, to one of greater security, like his 
residence in Ziklag. The same persons who 
were called to love the Lord because they were 
participant of His loving-kindness, are now 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 37 

called to courage and manly firmness of soul 
because their hope is fixed on Jehovah. The 
progress of thought is significant and obvious. 
Love to God, resting on consciousness of His 
love to us, is the true armour. '' There is no 
fear in love." The heart filled with it is strong 
to resist the pressure of outward disasters, while 
the empty heart is crushed like a deserted hulk 
by the grinding collision of the icebergs that 
drift rudderless on the wild wintry sea of life. 
Love, too, is the condition of hope. The 
patience and expectation of the latter must 
come from the present fruition of the sweetness 
of the former. Of these fair sisters. Love is the 
elder as the greater; it is she who bears in 
her hands the rich metal from which Hope 
forges her anchor, and the strong cords that 
hold it ; her experience supplies all the colours 
with which her sister paints the dim distance ; 
and she it is who makes the other bold to be 
sure of the future, and clear-sighted to see the 
things that are not as though they were. To 
love the Lord is the path, and the only path, to 
hoping in the Lord. So had the psalmist found 
it for himself. In his changeful, perilous years 
of exile he had learned that the brightness with 



138 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

which hope glowed on his lonely path depended 
not on the accident of greater or less external 
security, but on the energy of the clear flame of 
love in his heart. Not in vain had his trials 
been to him, which cast that rich treasure to his 
feet from their stormy waves. Not in vain will 
ours be to us, if we learn the lesson which he 
here would divide with all those " that wait on 
the Lord." 

Our limits prevent the further examination of 
the remaining psalms of this period. It is the 
less necessary, inasmuch as those which have 
been already considered fairly represent the 
whole. The xi., xiii., xvii., xxii., xxv., and Ixiv. 
may, with varying probability, be considered 
as belonging to the Sauline persecution. To 
this list some critics would add the xl. and Ixix., 
but on very uncertain grounds. But if we ex- 
clude them, the others have a strong family 
likeness, not only with each other, but with 
those which have been presented to the reader. 
The imagery of the wilderness, which has be- 
come so familiar to us, continually reappears ; 
the prowling wild beasts, the nets and snares, 
the hunted psalmist like a timid bird among the 
hills ; the protestation of innocence, the passion- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 39 

ate invocation of retribution on the wicked, the 
confidence that their own devices will come 
down on their heads, the intense yearning of 
soul after God — are all repeated in these psalms. 
Single metaphors and peculiar phrases which 
we have already met with recur — as, for instance, 
** the shadow of Thy wings" (xvii. 8, Ivii. i), 
and the singular phrase rendered in our version, 
" show Thy marvellous loving-kindness " (xvii. 
7, xxxi. 21), which is found only here. In one 
of these psalms (xxxv. 13) there seems to be a 
reference to his earliest days at the court, and 
to the depth of loving sympathy with Saul's 
darkened spirit, which he learned to cherish, as 
he stood before him to soothe him with the 
ordered harmonies of harp and voice. The 
words are so definite that they appear to refer 
to some historic occasion : 

And as for me — in their sickness my clothing was 

sackcloth, 
With fasting I humbled my soul, 
And my prayer into my own bosom returned. 

So truly did he feel for him who is now his foe. 
The outward marks of mourning became the 
natural expression of his feelings. Such is 
plainly the meaning of the two former clauses, 



140 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

as well as of the following verse. As the whole 
is a description of the outward signs of grief, it 
seems better to understand the last of these 
three clauses as a picture of the bent head, 
sunk on the bosom even while he prayed,* than 
to break the connection by referring it either to 
the requital of hate for his sympathy,+ or to the 
purity of his prayer, which was such that he 
could desire nothing more for himself.:}: He 
goes on with the enumeration of the signs of 
sorrow : " As if (he had been) a friend, a brother 
to me, I went," — walking slowly, like a man 
absorbed in sorrow : *' as one who laments a 
mother, in mourning garments I bowed down," 
— walking with a weary, heavy stoop, like one 
crushed by a mother's death, with the garb of 
woe. Thus faithfully had he loved, and truly 
wept for the noble ruined soul which, blinded 
by passion and poisoned by lies, had turned to 
be his enemy. And that same love clung by 
him to the last, as it ever does with great and 
good men, who learn of God to suffer long 
and be kind, to bear all things, and hope all 
things. 

^ So Ewald and Delitzsch. f Hupfeld. 

X Perowne. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I4I 

Of these psalms the xxii. is remarkable. In 
it David's personal experience seems to afiford 
only the starting-point for a purely Messianic 
prophecy, which embraces many particulars 
that far transcend anything recorded of his 
sorrows. The impossibility of finding occur- 
rences in his life corresponding to such traits as 
tortured limbs and burning thirst, pierced hands 
and parted garments, has driven some critics to 
the hypothesis that we have here a psalm of the 
exile describing either actual sufferings inflicted 
on some unknown confessor in Babylon, or in 
figurative language the calamities of Israel there. 
But the Davidic origin is confirmed by many 
obvious points of resemblance with the psalms 
which are indisputably his, and especially 
with those of the Sauline period, while the 
difficulty of finding historical facts answering to 
the emphatic language is evaded, not met, by 
either assuming that such facts existed in some 
life which has left no trace, or by forcing a 
metaphorical sense on words which sound 
wonderfully like the sad language of a real 
sufferer. Of course, if we believe that prediction 
is an absurdity, any difficulty will be lighter 
than the acknowledgment that we have pre- 



142 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

diction here. But, unless we have a foregone 
conclusion of that sort to blind us, we shall see 

rin this psalm a clear example of the prophecy 
of a suffering Messiah. In most of the other 
psalms where David speaks of his sorrows we 
have only a typical foreshadowing of Christ. 
— But in this, and in such others as Ixix. and cix. 
(if these are David's), we have type changing 
into prophecy, and the person of the psalmist 
fading away before the image which, by occasion 
of his own griefs, rose vast, and solemn, and 
distant before his prophet gaze, — the image of 
One who should be perfectly all which he was 
in partial measure, the anointed of God, the 
utterer of His name to His brethren, the King 
of Israel, — and whose path to His dominion 
should be thickly strewn with solitary sorrow, 
and reproach, and agony, to whose far more ex- 
ceeding weight of woe all his affliction was light 
as a feather, and transitory as a moment. And 
when the psalmist had learned that lesson, 
besides all the others of trust and patience which 
his wanderings taught him, his schooling was 
nearly over, he was almost ready for a new 
discipline ; and the slowly-evolving revelation 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 1 43 

of God's purposes, which by his sorrows had 
unfolded more distinctly than before "the 
sufferings of the Messiah," was ripening for the 
unveiling, in his Kinghood, of " the glory that 
should follow/' 



144 THE LIFE OF DAVID 



IX.— THE KING. 

WE have now to turn and see the sudden 
change of fortune which lifted the 
exile to a throne. The heavy cloud which had 
brooded so long over the doomed king broke 
in lightning crash on the disastrous field of 
Gilboa. Where is there a sadder and more 
solemn story of the fate of a soul which makes 
shipwreck " of faith and of a good conscience," 
than that awful page which tells how, godless, 
wretched, mad with despair and measureless 
pride, he flung himself on his bloody sword, 
and died a suicide's death, with sons and armour- 
bearer and all his men, a ghastly court of 
corpses, laid round him ? He had once been 
brave, modest, and kind, full of noble purposes 
and generous affections — and he ended so. 
Into what doleful regions of hate and darkness 
may self-will drag a soul, when once the reins 
fall loose from a slackened hand ! And what 
a pathetic beam of struggling light gleams 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 145 

through heavy clouds, in the grateful exploit 
of the men of Jabesh, who remembered how he 
had once saved them, while yet he could care 
and dare for his kingdom, and perilled their 
lives to bear the poor headless corpse to its rude 
resting-place ! 

The news is received by the fugitive at Ziklag 
in striking and characteristic fashion. He first 
flames out in fierce wrath upon the lying 
Amalekite, who had hurried with the tidings 
and sought favour by falsely representing that 
he had killed the king on the field. A short 
shrift and a bloody end were his. And then 
the wrath melts into mourning. Forgetting the 
mad hatred and wild struggles of that poor 
soul, and his own wTongs, remembering only 
the friendship and nobleness of his earlier days, 
he casts over the mangled corpses of Saul and 
Jonathan the mantle of his sw^eet elegy, and 
bathes them with the healing waters of his 
unstinted praise and undying love. Not till 
these two offices of justice and aff'ection had 
been performed, does he remember himself and 
the change in his own position which had been 
effected. He had never thought of Saul as 
standing between him and the kingdom ; the 

K 



146 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

first feeling on his death was not, as it would 
have been with a less devout and less generous 
heart, a flush of gladness at the thought of the 
empty throne, but a sharp pang of pain from 
the sense of an empty heart. And even when 
he begins to look forward to his own new 
course, there is that same remarkable passive- 
ness which we have observed already. His 
first step is to " inquire of the Lord, saying, 
Shall I go up to any of the cities of Judah ? " 
(2 Sam. ii. i). He will do nothing in this crisis 
of his fortunes, when all which had been so long 
a hope seemed to be rapidly becoming a fact, 
until his Shepherd shall lead him. Rapid and 
impetuous as he was by nature, schooled to 
swift decisions, followed by still swifter action, 
knowing that a blow struck at once, while all 
was chaos and despair at home, might set him 
on the throne, he holds nature and policy and 
the impatience of his people in check to hear 
what God will say. So fully did he fulfil the 
vow of his early psalm, " My strength ! upon 
thee will I wait " (lix. 9). 

We can fancy the glad march to the ancient 
Hebron, where the great fathers of the nation 
lay in their rock-hewn tombs. Even before the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 1 47 

death of Saul, David's strength had been 
rapidly increasing, by a constant stream of 
fugitives from the confusion and misery into 
which the kingdom had fallen. Even Benjamin, 
Saul's own tribe, sent him some of its famous 
archers — a sinister omen of the king's waning 
fortunes ; the hardy half-independent men of 
Manasseh and Gad, from the pastoral uplands 
on the east of Jordan, "whose faces," according 
to the vivid description of the chronicler ( i 
Chron. xii. 8), " were like the faces of lions, and 
were as swift as roes upon the mountains," 
sought his standard ; and from his own kins- 
men of Judah recruits " day by day came to 
David to help him, until it was a great host 
like the host of God." With such forces, it 
would have been child's play to have subdued 
any scattered troops of the former dynasty 
which might still have been in a condition to 
keep the field. But he made no attempt of the 
sort ; and even when he came to Hebron he 
took no measures to advance any claims to the 
crown. The language of the history seems 
rather to imply a disbanding of his army, or at 
least their settling down to domestic life in the 
villages round Hebron, without a thought of 



I4S THE LIFE OF DAVID 

winning the kingdom by arms. And his eleva- 
tion to the partial monarchy which he at first 
possessed was the spontaneous act of " the men 
of Judah," who come to him and anoint him 
king over Judah. 

The limits of his territory are substantially 
those of the kingdom over which his descendants 
ruled after Jeroboam's revolt, thus indicating 
the existence of a natural '' line of cleavage " 
between north and south. The geographical 
position of Benjamin finally attached it to the 
latter monarchy ; but for the present, the wish 
to retain the supremacy which it had had while 
the king was one of the tribe, made it the 
nucleus of a feeble and lingering opposition to 
David, headed by Saul's cousin Abner, and 
rallying round his incompetent son Ishbosheth."* 
The chronology of this period is obscure. 
David reigned in Hebron seven years and a 
half, and as Ishbosheth's phantom sovereignty 
only occupied two of these years, and those 
evidently the last, it would appear almost as if 

* The Canaanitish worship of Baal seems to have lingered 
in Saul's family. One of his grand-uncles was named Baal 
(i Chron. ix. 36) ; his son was really called Eshbaal (Fire of 
Baal), which was contemptuously converted into Ishbosheth 
(Man of Shame). So also Mephibosheth was properly Merib- 
baal (Fighter for Baal). 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 49 

the Philistines had held the country, with the 
exception of Judah, in such force that no rival 
cared to claim the dangerous dignity, and that 
five years passed before the invaders were so 
far cleared out as to leave leisure for civil war. 

The summary narrative of these seven years 
presents the still youthful king in a very lov- 
able light. The same temper which had marked 
his first acts after Saul's death is strikingly 
brought out (2 Sam. ii. — iv.) He seems to 
have left the conduct of the war altogether to 
Joab, as if he shrank from striking a single 
blow for his own advancement. When he does 
interfere, it is on the side of peace, to curb 
and chastise ferocious vengeance and das- 
tardly assassination. The incidents recorded 
all go to make up a picture of rare generosity, 
of patient waiting for God to fulfil His purposes, 
of longing that the miserable strife between the 
tribes of God's inheritance should end. He 
sends grateful messages to Jabesh-Gilead ; he 
will not begin the conflict with the insurgents. 
The only actual fight recorded is provoked by 
Abner, and managed with unwonted mildness 
by Joab. The list of his children born in 
Hebron is inserted in the very heart of the 



150 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

story of the insurrection, a token of the quiet 
domestic life of peaceful joys and cares which 
he lived while the storm was raging without. 
Eagerly, and without suspicion, he welcomes 
Abner's advances towards reconciliation. He 
falls for a moment to the level of his times, and 
yields to a strong temptation, in making the 
restoration of his long-lost wife Michal the 
condition of further negotiations — a demand 
which was strictly just, no doubt, but for which 
little more can be said. The generosity of his 
nature and the ideal purity of his love, which 
that incident shadows, shine out again in his 
indignation at Joab's murder of Abner, though 
he was too meek to avenge it. There is no 
more beautiful picture in his life than that of his 
following the bier where lay the bloody corpse 
of the man who had been his enemy ever since 
he had known him, and sealing the reconciliation 
which Death ever makes in noble souls, by the 
pathetic dirge he chanted over Abner's grave. 
We have a glimpse of his people's unbounded 
confidence in him, given incidentally when we 
are told that his sorrow pleased them, *'as what- 
soever the king did pleased all the people." 
We have a glimpse of the feebleness of his new 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 5 I 

monarchy as against the fierce soldier who had 
done so much to make it, in his acknowledg- 
ment that he was yet weak, being but recently 
anointed king, and that these vehement sons of 
Zeruiah were too strong for him ; and we have 
a remarkable trace of connection with the 
psalms, in the closing words with which he in- 
vokes on Joab the vengeance which he as yet 
felt himself unable to execute : "The Lord shall 
reward the doer of evil according to his wicked- 
ness." 

The only other incident recorded of his reign 
in Hebron is his execution of summary justice 
upon the murderers of the poor puppet-king 
Ishbosheth, upon whose death, following so 
closely that of Abner, the whole resistance to 
David's power collapses. There had never been 
any real popular opposition. His enemies are 
emphatically named as ''the house of Saul," 
and we find Abner himself admitting that "the 
elders of Israel " wanted David as king (2 Sam. 
iii. 17), so that when he was gone, it is two 
Benjamites who give the coup-de-grdce to Ish- 
bosheth, and end the whole shadowy rival 
power. Immediately the rulers of all the tribes 
come up to Hebron, with the tender of the 



152 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

crown. They offer it on the triple grounds of 
kinship, of his military service even in Saul's 
reign, and of the Divine promise of the throne. 
A solemn pact was made, and David was 
anointed in Hebron, a king by Divine right, but 
also a constitutional monarch chosen by popular 
election, and limited in his powers. 

The first result of his new strength is the 
capture of the old hill-fortress of the Jebusites, 
the city of Melchizedek, which had frowned 
down upon Israel unsubdued till now, and 
whose inhabitants trusted so absolutely in its 
natural strength that their answer to the demand 
for surrender was the jeer, "Thou wilt not come 
hither, but the blind and lame will drive thee 
away." This time David does not leave the 
war to others. For the first time for seven 
years we read, " The king and his men went to 
Jerusalem." Established there as his capital, 
he reigns for some ten years with unbroken 
prosperity over a loyal and loving people, 
with this for the summary of the whole 
period, " David went on and grew great, and 
the Lord God of Hosts was with him " (2 Sam. 
V. 10). These years are marked by three prin- 
cipal events — the bringing up of the ark to the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 53 

City of David, the promise by Nathan of the 
perpetual dominion of his house, and the un- 
broken flow of victories over the surrounding 
nations. These are the salient points of the 
narrative in the Book of Samuel (2 Sam. v. — 
viii.), and are all abundantly illustrated by the 
psalms. We shall have next then to consider 
"The Songs of the King." 

How did the fugitive bear his sudden change 
of fortune ? What were his thoughts when at 
last the dignity which he had ever expected and 
never sought was his ? The answer is ready to 
our hand in that grand psalm (Ps. xviii.) which 
he *' spake in the day that the Lord delivered 
him from all his enemies, and from the hand of 
Saul." The language of this superscription 
seems to connect the psalm with the period of 
internal and external repose which preceded 
and prompted David's "purpose to build an 
house for the Lord " (2 Sam. vii.) The same 
thankfulness which glows so brightly in the 
psalm stimulated that desire, and the emphatic 
reference to the mercy promised by God to " his 
seed for evermore," which closes the hymn, 
points perhaps to the definite promise of the 
perpetuity of the kingdom to his descendants, 



154 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

which was God's answer to the same desire. 
But whether the psalm belongs to the years of 
the partial sovereignty at Hebron, or to those 
of the complete dominion at Jerusalem, it can- 
not be later than the second of these two dates ; 
and whatever may have been the time of its 
composition, the feelings which it expresses are 
those of the first freshness of thankful praise 
when he was firmly settled in the kingdom. 
Some critics would throw it onwards to the very 
close of his life. But this has little in its favour 
beyond the fact that the author of the Book of 
Samuel has placed his version of the psalm 
among the records of David's last days. There 
is, however, nothing to show that that position 
is due to chronological considerations. The 
victories over heathen nations which are sup- 
posed to be referred to in the psalm, and are 
relied on by the advocates of later date, really 
point to the earlier, which was the time of his 
most brilliant conquests. And the marked 
assertions of his own purity, as well as the 
triumphant tone of the whole, neither of which 
characteristics corresponds to the sad and shaded 
years after his great fall, point in the same 
direction. On the whole, then, we may fairly 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 55 

take this psalm as belonging to the bright be- 
ginning of the monarchy, and as showing us 
how well the king remembered the vows which 
the exile had mingled with his tears. 

It is one long outpouring of rapturous thank- 
fulness and triumphant adoration, which streams 
from a full heart in buoyant waves of song. 
Nowhere else, even in the psalms — and if not 
there, certainly nowhere else — is there such a 
continuous tide of unmingled praise, such mag- 
nificence of imagery, such passion of love to the 
delivering God, such joyous energy of conquer- 
ing trust. It throbs throughout with the life 
blood of devotion. The strong flame, white 
with its very ardour, quivers with its own in- 
tensity as it steadily rises heavenward. All the 
terrors, and pains, and dangers of the weary 
years — the black fuel for the ruddy glow — melt 
into warmth too great for smoke, too equable 
to blaze. The plaintive notes that had so often 
wailed from his harp, sad as if the night wind 
had been wandering among its chords, have all 
led up to this rushing burst of full-toned glad- 
ness. The very blessedness of heaven is antici- 
pated, when sorrows gone by are understood 
and seen in their connection with the joy to 



156 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

which they have led, and are felt to be the 
theme for deepest thankfulness. Thank God 
that, for the consolation of the whole world, we 
have this hymn of praise from the same lips 
which said, *' My life is spent with grief, and 
my years with sighing." '' We have seen the 
end of the Lord, that the Lord is very pitiful 
and of tender mercy." The tremulous minors 
of trustful sorrow shall swell into rapturous 
praise ; and he who, compassed with foes, cries 
upon God, will, here or yonder, sing this song 
"unto the Lord, in the day that the Lord 
delivers him from the hand of all his enemies." 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 57 



X.— THE KING— CONTINUED. 

IN our last chapter we have seen that the key- 
note of " The Songs of the King " may be 
said to be struck in Psalm xviii. Its complete 
analysis would carry us far beyond our limits. 
We can but glance at some of the more promi- 
nent points of the psalm. 

The first clause strikes the key-note. " I love 
Thee, O Jehovah, my strength." That personal 
attachment to God, which is so characteristic of 
David's religion, can no longer be pent up in 
silence, but gushes forth like some imprisoned 
stream, broad and full even from its well-head. 
The common word for " love " is too weak for 
him, and he bends to his use another, never 
elsewhere employed to express man's emotions 
towards God, the intensity of which is but 
feebly expressed by some such periphrasis as, 
" From my heart do I love Thee." The same 
exalted feeling is wonderfully set forth by the 
loving accumulation of Divine names which 



158 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

follow, as if he would heap together in one 
great pile all the rich experiences of that God, 
unnamed after all names, which he had garnered 
up in his distresses and deliverances. They tell 
so much as the poor vehicle of words can tell, 
what his Shepherd in the heavens had been to 
him. They are the treasures which he has 
brought back from his exile ; and they most 
pathetically point to the songs of that time. 
He had called on God by these names when 
it was hard to believe in their reality, and now 
he repeats them all in his glad hour of fruition, 
for token that they who in their extremity trust 
in the name of the Lord will one day have the 
truth of faith transformed into truth of experi- 
ence. "Jehovah, my rock and my fortress," 
reminds us of his cry in Ziklag, " Thou art my 
rock and my fortress " (xxxi. 3), and of the 
"hold" (the same word) of Adullam in which 
he had lain secure. "My deliverer" echoes 
many a sigh in the past, now changed into 
music of praise. " My rock " (a different word 
from that in a preceding clause), "in whom I 
take refuge," recalls the prayer, " Be Thou my 
rock of strength " (xxxi. 2), and his former 
effort of confidence, when, in the midst of 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 59 

calamities, he said, " My soul takes refuge in 
Thee" (Ivii. i.) "My shield" carries us back 
to the ancient promise, fresh after so many 
centuries, and fulfilled anew in every age, ''Fear 
not, Abram, I am thy shield," and to his own 
trustful words at a time when trust was difficult, 
''My shield is upon God" (vii. 10). "My high 
tower," the last of this glowing series, links on 
to the hope breathed in the first song of his 
exile, " God is my defence " (the same expres- 
sion) ; "Thou hast been my defence in the day 
of trouble" (lix. 9, 16). And then he sums up 
his whole past in one general sentence, which 
tells his habitual resource in his troubles, and 
the blessed help which he has ever found, " I 
call on Jehovah, who is worthy to be praised f 
and from my enemies am I saved " (verse 3). 

No comment can heighten, and no transla- 
tion can adequately represent, while none can 
altogether destroy the unapproachable magnifi- 
cence of the description which follows, of the 
majestic coming forth of God in answer to his 
cry. It stands at the very highest point, even 
when compared with the other sublime passages 

^ The old English word "the worshipful" comes near the 
form and meaning of the phrase. 



l6o THE LIFE OF DAVID 

of a like kind in Scripture. How pathetically 
he paints his sore need in metaphors which 
again bring to mind the songs of the outlaw : — 

The snares of death compassed me, 
And floods of destruction made me afraid ; 
The snares of Sheol surrounded me, 
The toils of death surprised me. 

As he so often likened himself to some wild 
creature in the nets, so here Death, the hunter, 
has cast his fatal cords about him, and they are 
ready suddenly to close on the unsuspecting 
prey. Or, varying the image, he is sinking in 
black waters, which are designated by a difficult 
phrase (literally, *' streams of Belial," or worth- 
lessness), which is most probably rendered as 
above (so Ewald, Hupfeld). In this dire ex- 
tremity one thing alone is left him. He is 
snared, but he has his voice free to cry with, 
and a God to cry to. He is all but sinking, 
but he can still shriek (so one of the words 
might be rendered) " like some strong swimmer 
in his agony." And it is enough. That one 
loud call for help rises, like some slender pillar 
of incense-smoke, straight into the palace 
temple of God — and, as he says, with a mean- 
ing which our version obscures, " My cry before 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. lOl 

Him came into His ears." The prayer that 
springs from a living consciousness of being 
in God's presence, even when nearest to perish- 
ing, is the prayer that He hears. The cry is 
a poor, thin, solitary voice, unheard on earth, 
though shrill enough to rise to heaven ; the 
answer shakes creation. One man in his ex- 
tremity can put in motion all the magnificence 
of God. Overwhelming is the contrast between 
the cause and the effect. And marvellous as 
the greatness, so also is the swiftness of the 
answer. A moment suffices — and then ! Even 
whilst he cries, the rocking earth and the 
quivering foundations of the hills are conscious 
that the Lord comes from afar for his help. 
The majestic self-revelation of God as the 
deliverer has for its occasion the psalmist's 
cry of distress, and for its issue, " He drew me 
out of many waters." All the splendour flames 
out because a poor man prays, and all the 
upheaval of earth and the artillery of heaven 
has simply this for its end, that a poor man 
may be delivered. The paradox of prayer 
never found a more bold expression than in 
this triumphant utterance, of the insignificant 
occasion for, and the equally insignificant result 

L 



I 62 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

sought by, the exercise of the energy of 
Omnipotence. 

The Divine deliverance is set forth under 
the familiar image of the coming of God in a 
tempest. Before it bursts, and simultaneous 
with the prayer, the " earth rocks and quivers," 
the sunless "pillars of the hills reel and rock 
to and fro," as if conscious of the gathering 
wrath which begins to flame far off in the 
highest heavens. There has been no forth- 
putting yet of the Divine power. It is but 
accumulating its fiery energy, and already the 
solid framework of the world trembles, antici- 
pating the coming crash. The firmest things 
shake, the loftiest bow before His wrath. 
" There went up smoke out of his nostrils, and 
fire out of his mouth devoured ; coals were 
kindled by it." This kindling anger, expressed 
by these tremendous metaphors, is conceived 
of as the preparation in " His temple " for the 
earthly manifestation of delivering vengeance. 
It is like some distant thunder-cloud which 
grows on the horizon into ominous blackness, 
and seems to be filling its ashen-coloured depths 
with store of lightnings. Then the piled-up 
terror begins to move, and, drawing nearer. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 1 63 

pours out an avalanche of gloom seamed with 

fire. First the storm-cloud descends, hanging 

lower and lower in the sky. And whose foot 

is that which is planted upon its heavy mass, 

thick and frowning enough to be the veil of 

God.? 

"He bowed the heavens, and came down, 
And blackness of cloud was under His feet.'^ 

Then the sudden rush of wind which heralds 
the lightning breaks the awful silence : — 

And He rode upon a cherub, and did fly, 

Yea, He swept along upon the wings of the wind. 

The cherubs bear, as in a chariot, the throned 
God, and the swift pinions of the storm bear 
the cherubs. But He that sits upon the throne, 
above material forces and the highest creatures, 
is unseen. The psalmist's imagination stops at 
its base, nor dares to gaze into that light above ; 
and the silence is more impressive than all 
words. Instead of pagan attempts at a likeness 
of God, we have next painted, with equal de- 
scriptive accuracy, poetic force, and theological 
truth, the pitchy blackness which hides Him. In 
the gloom of its depths He makes His " secret 
place" His "tent." It is "darkness of waters," 
that is, darkness from which streams out the 



164 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

thunder-rain ; it is " thick clouds of the skies ; " 
or perhaps the expression should be rendered, 
"heavy masses of clouds." Then comes the 
crash of the tempest. The brightness that lies 
closer around Him, and lives in the heart of the 
blackness, flames forth, parting the thick clouds 
— and through the awful rent hail and coals of 
fire are flung down on the trembling earth. 
The grand description may be rendered in two 
ways : either that adopted in our version, " At 
the brightness that was before Him His thick 
clouds passed — hailstones and coals of fire ; " 
or, " Through His thick clouds there passed 
hailstones and coals of fire." The former of 
these is the more dramatic ; the broken con- 
struction expresses more vividly the fierce sud- 
denness of the lightning blaze and of the down- 
rush of the hail, and is confirmed by the repeti- 
tion of the same words in the same construction 
in the next verse. That verse describes another 
burst of the tempest — the deep roll of the 
thunder along the skies is the voice of Jehovah, 
and again the lightning tears through the 
clouds, and the hail streams down. With what 
profound truth all this destructive power is 
represented as coming from the brightness of 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 1 65 

God — that "glory" which in its own nature is 
h'ght, but in its contact with finite and sinful 
creatures must needs become darkness, rent 
asunder by lightning ! What lessons as to the 
root and the essential nature of all punitive acts 
of God cluster round such words ! and how 
calm and blessed the faith which can pierce 
even the thickest mass "that veileth Love ! " — 
to see the light at the centre, even though the 
circumference be brooding thunder-clouds torn 
by sudden fires. Then comes the purpose of 
all this apocalypse of Divine magnificence. The 
fiery arrows scatter the psalmist's enemies. The 
waters in which he had well nigh drowned are 
dried up before the hot breath of His anger. 
" That dread voice " speaks " which shrinks 
their streams." And amid the blaze of tempest, 
the rocking earth, and the failing floods, His 
arm is thrust forth from above, and draws His 
servant from many waters. As one in later 
times, " he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he 
cried, saying. Lord, save me ; and immediately 
He stretched forth His hand and caught him." 

A calmer tone follows, as the psalmist re- 
counts without metaphor his deliverance, and 
reiterates the same assertion of his innocence 



I 66 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

which we have already found so frequently in 
the previous psalms (vers. 17 — 24). Rising from 
his personal experience to the broad and lofty 
thoughts of God which that experience had 
taught him, as it does all who prize life chiefly 
as a means of knowing Him, he proclaims the 
solemn truth, that in the exercise of a righteous 
retribution, and by the very necessity of our 
moral nature, God appears to man what 
man is to God : loving to the loving, up- 
right to the upright, pure to the pure, and 
froward to the froward. Our thoughts of God 
are shaped by our moral character ; the capacity 
of perceiving depends on sympathy. "Unless the 
eye were light, how could it see the sun ? " The 
self-revelation of God in His providence, of 
which only the psalm speaks, is modified ac- 
cording to our moral character, being full of 
love to those who love, being harsh and an- 
tagonistic to those who set themselves in opposi- 
tion to it. There is a higher law of grace, 
whereby the sinfulness of man but draws forth 
the tenderness of a father's pardoning pity ; 
and the brightest revelation of His love is made 
to froward prodigals. But that is not in the 
psalmist's view here, nor does it interfere with 
the law of retribution in its own sphere. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 67 

The purely personal tone is again resumed, 
and continued unbroken to the close. In the 
former portion David was passive, except for 
the voice of prayer, and God's arm alone was 
his deliverance. In the latter half he is active, 
the conquering king, whose arm is strengthened 
for victory by God. This difference may pos- 
sibly suggest the reference of the former half to 
the Sauline persecution, when, as we have seen, 
the exile ever shrunk from avenging himself; 
and of the latter to the early years of his 
monarchy, which, as we shall see, were charac- 
terized by much successful military activity ; 
and if so, the date of the psalm would most 
naturally be taken to be the close of his vic- 
torious campaigns, when " the Lord had given 
him rest from all his enemies round about " (2 
Sam. vii. i). Be that as it may, the latter por- 
tion of the psalm shows us the soldier king 
tracing all his past victories to God alone, and 
building upon them the confidence of a world- 
wide dominion. The point at which memory 
passes into hope is difficult to determine, and 
great variety of opinion prevails on the matter 
among commentators. It is perhaps best to 
follow many of the older versions, and the 



I 68 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

valuable exposition of Hupfeld, in regarding 
the whole section from ver. 37 of our translation 
as the expression of the trust which past experi- 
ence had wrought. We shall then have two 
periods in the second half of the psalm — the 
past victories won by God's help (vers. 31 — 36), 
the coming triumphs of which these are the 
pledge (vers. 37 — end). 

In the former there shine out not only David's 
habitual consciousness of dependence on and 
aid from God, but also a very striking picture 
of his physical qualifications for a military 
leader. He is girded with bodily strength, 
swift and sure of foot like a deer, able to scale 
the crags where his foes fortified themselves 
like the wild antelopes he had so often seen 
bounding among the dizzy ledges of the cliffs 
in the wilderness ; his hands are trained for 
war, and his sinewy arms can bend the great 
bow of brass. But these capacities are gifts, 
and not they, but their Giver, have made him 
victorious. Looking back upon all his past, 
this is its summing up : — 

" Thou hast also given me the shield of Thy salvation, 
And Thy right hand hath holden me up, 
And Thy lovehness hath made me great." 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 69 

God's Strength, God's buckler, God's supporting 
hand, God's condescension, by which He bows 
down to look upon and help the feeble, with the 
humble showing Himself humble— these have 
been his weapons, and from these has come his 
victory. 

And because of these, he looks forward to a 
future like the past, but more glorious still, 
thereby teaching us how the unchanging faith- 
fulness of our God should encourage us to take 
all the blessings which we have received as but 
the earnest of what is yet to come. He sees 
himself pursuing his enemies, and smiting them 
to the ground. The fierce light of battle blazes 
through the rapid sentences which paint the panic 
flight, and the swift pursuit, the vain shrieks to 
man and God for succour, and the utter anni- 
hilation of the foe : — 

(42) " And I will pound them like dust before the wind, 
Like street-filth will I empty them out.^' 

Then he gives utterance to the consciousness 
that his kingdom is destined to extend far 
beyond the limits of Israel, in words which, like 
so many of the prophecies, may be translated in 
the present tense, but are obviously future in 
signification — the prophet placing himself in 



I 70 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

imagination in the midst of the time of which 
he speaks : — 

(43) " Thou deliverest me from the strivings of the 
people {j,e.^ Israel), 
Thou makest me head of the heathen ; 
People whom I knew not serve me. 

(zl4) At the hearing of the ear they obey me. 

The sons of the stranger feign obedience to me. 

(45) The sons of the stranger fade away, 

They come trembling from their hiding-places." 

The rebellion which weakened his early reign 
is subdued, and beyond the bounds of his own 
people his dominion spreads. Strange tribes 
submit to the very sound of his name, and 
crouch before him in extorted and pretended 
submission. The words are literally " lie unto 
me," descriptive of the profuse professions of 
loyalty characteristic of conquered orientals. 
Their power withers before him like a gathered 
flower before a hot wind, and the fugitives creep 
trembling out of their holes where they have 
hid themselves. 

Again he recurs to the one thought which 
flows like a river of light through all the psalm 
— that all his help is in God. The names which 
he lovingly heaped together at the beginning 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I71 

are in part echoed in the close. "The Lord 
liveth, and blessed is my rock, and the God of 
my salvation is exalted." His deliverances 
have taught him to know a living God, swift to 
hear, active to help, in whom he lives, who has 
magnified His own name in that He has saved 
His servant. And as that blessed conviction is 
the sum of all his experience, so one glad vow 
expresses all his resolves, and thrills with the 
expectation which he had cherished even in his 
lonely exile, that the music of his psalm would 
one day echo through all the world. With lofty 
consciousness of his new dignity, and with lowly 
sense that it is God's gift, he emphatically 
names himself His king, His anointed, taking, 
as it were, his crown from his brows and laying 
it on the altar. With prophetic eye he looks 
onward, and sees the throne to which he had 
been led by a series of miracles enduring for 
ever, and the mercy of God sustaining the 
dominion of his house through all generations : — 

(49) " Therefore will I give thanks to Thee among the 

nations, O Jehovah, 
And to Thy name will I strike the harp : 

(50) Who maketh great the deliverances of His king, 
And executeth mercy for His anointed, 

For David and his seed for evermore.^' 



1 72 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

And what were his purposes for the future ? 
Here is his answer, in a psalm which has been 
with considerable appropriateness regarded as a 
kind of manifesto of the principles which he in- 
tended should characterize his reign (Psa. ci.) : 
"I will walk within my house with a perfect 
heart. I will set no wicked thing before mine 
eyes." For himself, he begins his reign with 
noble self-restraint, not meaning to make it a 
region of indulgence, but feeling that there is a 
law above his will, of which he is only the ser- 
vant, and knowing that if his people and his 
public life are to be what they should be, his 
own personal and domestic life must be pure. 
As for his court and his ministers, he will make 
a clean sweep of the vermin who swarm and 
sting and buzz about a throne. The froward, 
the wicked, privy slanderers, proud hearts, 
crafty plotters, liars, and evil-doers he will not 
suffer — but " mine eyes shall be upon the faith- 
ful in the land ; he that walketh in a perfect 
way, he shall serve me." He is fired with 
ambition, such as has brightened the beginning 
of many a reign which has darkened to cruelty 
and crime, to make his kingdom some faint 
image of God's, and to bring the actual Israel 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 73 

into conformity with its ancient Magna Charta, 
" Ye shall be to me a holy nation." And so, 
not knowing perhaps how hard a task he 
planned, and little dreaming of his own sore 
fall, he grasps the sword, resolved to use it for 
the terror of evil-doers, and vows, " I will early 
destroy all the wicked in the land, that I may 
cut off all wicked doers from the city of the 
Lord." Such was his "proclamation against 
vice and immorality " on his accession to his 
throne. 



I 74 THE LIFE OF DAVID 



XI.— THE KING— CONTINUED. 

THE years thus well begun are, in the 
historical books, characterized mainly by 
three events, namely, the bringing up of the ark 
to the newly won city of David, Nathan's 
prophecy of the perpetual dominion of his house, 
and his victories over the surrounding nations. 
These three hinges of the narrative are all abun- 
dantly illustrated in the psalms. 

As to the first, we have relics of the joyful 
ceremonial connected with it in two psalms, the 
fifteenth and twenty-fourth, which are singularly 
alike not only in substance but in manner, both 
being thrown into a highly dramatic form by 
question and answer. This peculiarity, as we 
shall see, is one of the links of connection which 
unite them with the history as given in the Book 
of Samuel (2 Sam. vi.). From that record we 
learn that David's first thought after he was 
firmly seated as king over all Israel, was the 
enthronement in his recently-captured city of 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 75 

the long-forgotten ark. That venerable symbol 
of the presence of the true King had passed 
through many vicissitudes since the days when 
it had been carried round the walls of Jericho. 
Superstitiously borne into battle, as if it were a 
mere magic palladium, by men whose hearts 
were not right with God, the presence which 
they had invoked became their ruin, and Israel 
was shattered, and " the ark of God taken," on 
the fatal field of Aphek. It had been carried in 
triumph through Philistine cities, and sent back 
in dismay. It had been welcomed with gladness 
by the villagers of Bethshemesh, who lifted their 
eyes from their harvest work, and saw it borne 
up the glen from the Philistine plain. Their 
rude curiosity was signally punished, " and the 
men of Bethshemesh said, Who is able to stand 
before this holy Lord God, and to whom shall 
He go up from us ? " It had been removed to 
the forest seclusion of Kirjath-jearim (the city 
of the woods), and there bestowed in the house 
of Abinadab "upon the hill," where it lay 
neglected and forgotten for about seventy years. 
During Saul's reign they " inquired not at it," 
and, indeed, the whole worship of Jehovah seems 
to have been decaying. David set himself 



I 76 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

to reorganize the public service of God, arranged 
a stafif of priests and Levites, with disciphned 
choir and orchestra (l Chron. xv.), and then pro- 
ceeded with representatives of the whole nation 
to bring up the ark from its woodland hiding- 
place. But again death turned gladness into 
dread, and Uzzah's fate silenced the joyous 
songs, " and David was afraid of the Lord that 
day, and said. How shall the ark of God come 
unto me ? " The dangerous honour fell on the 
house of Obed-edom ; and only after the bless- 
ing which followed its three months' stay there, 
did he venture to carry out his purpose. The 
story of the actual removal of the ark to the city 
of David with glad ceremonial need not be 
repeated here ; nor the mocking gibes of Michal 
who had once loved him so fondly. Probably 
she bitterly resented her violent separation from 
the household joys that had grown up about her 
in her second home ; probably the woman who 
had had teraphim among her furniture cared 
nothing for the ark of God ; probably, as she 
grew older, her character had hardened in its 
lines, and become like her father's in its measure- 
less pride, and in its half-dread, half-hatred 
of David — and all these motives together pour 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. r 77 

their venom into her sarcasm. Taunts provoke 
taunts ; the husband feels that the wife is in 
heart a partisan of the fallen house of her father, 
and a despiser of the Lord and of His worship ; 
her words hiss with scorn, his flame with anger 
and rebuke — and so these two that had been so 
tender in the old days part for ever. The one 
doubtful act that stained his accession was 
quickly avenged. Better for both that she had 
never been rent from that feeble, loving husband 
that followed her weeping, and was driven back 
by a single word, flung at him by Abner as 
if he had been a dog at their heels ! (2 Sam. 
iii. 16). 

The gladness and triumph, the awe, and the 
memories of victory which clustered round the 
dread symbol of the presence of the Lord of 
Hosts, are wonderfully expressed in the choral 
twenty-fourth psalm. It is divided into two 
portions, which Ewald regards as being origin- 
ally two independent compositions. They 
are, however, obviously connected both in form 
and substance. In each we have question and 
answer, as in psalm xv., which belongs to the 
same period. The first half replies to the 
question, " Who shall ascend the hill of the 

M 



I 78 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

Lord, and who shall stand in His holy place ? " 
— an echo of the terror-struck exclamation of 
the people of Bethshemesh, already quoted. 
The answer is a description of the men who 
dzvell with God. The second half deals with 
the correlative inquiry, " Who is the King of 
Glory?" and describes the God who comes to dwell 
with men. It corresponds in substance, though not 
in form, with David's thought when Uzzah died, 
in so far as it regards God as drawing near to 
the worshippers, rather than the worshippers 
drawing near to Him. Both portions are united 
by a real internal connection, in that they set 
forth the mutual approach of God and man 
which leads to communion, and thus constitute 
the two halves of an inseparable whole. 

Most expositors recognise a choral structure 
in the psalm, as in several others of this date, as 
would be natural at the time of the reorganization 
of the public musical service. Probably we may 
gain the key to its form by supposing it to be a 
processional hymn, of which the first half was to 
be sung during the ascent to the city of David, 
and the second while standing before the gates. 
We have then to fancy the long line of worship- 
pers climbing the rocky steep hill-side to the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 79 

ancient fortress so recently won, the Levites 
bearing the ark, and the glad multitude stream- 
ing along behind them. 

First there swells forth from all the singers 
the triumphant proclamation of God's universal 
sovereignty, " The earth is the Lord's and the 
fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell 
therein. For He hath founded it upon the seas 
and established it upon the floods." It is very 
notew^orthy that such a thought should precede 
the declaration of His special dwelling in Zion. 
It guards that belief from the abuses to which it 
was of course liable — the superstitions, the nar- 
rowness, the contempt of all the rest of the 
world as God-deserted, which are its perversion 
in sensuous natures. If Israel came to fancy 
that God belonged to them, and that there was 
only one sacred place in all the world, it was not 
for want of clear utterances to the contrary, 
which became more emphatic with each fresh 
step in the development of the specializing 
system under which they lived. The very 
ground of their peculiar relation to God had 
been declared, in the hour of constituting it to 
be— "all the earth is Mine " (Exod. xix. 5). So 
now, when the symbol of His presence is to have 



l8o THE LIFE OF DAVID 

a local habitation in the centre of the national 
life, the psalmist lays for the foundation of his 
song the great truth, that the Divine presence is 
concentrated in Israel, but not confined there, 
and concentrated in order that it may be diffused. 
The glory that lights the bare top of Zion lies 
on all the hills ; and He who dwells between 
the cherubim dwells in all the world, which His 
continual presence fills with its fulness, and 
upholds above the floods. 

Then, as they climb, a single voice perhaps 
chants the solemn question, " Who shall ascend 
the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in the 
place of His holiness ^ " 

And the full-toned answer portrays the men 
who shall dwell with God, in words which begin 
indeed with stringent demands for absolute 
purity, but wonderfully change in tone as they 
advance, into gracious assurances, and the 
clearest vision that the moral nature which fits 
for God's presence is God's gift. '' The clean- 
handed, and pure-hearted, who has not lifted up 
his soul to vanity, nor sworn deceitfully;" there is 
the eternal law which nothing can ever alter, that 
to abide with God a man must be like God — the 
law of the new covenant as of the old, " Blessed 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 8 1 

are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
But this requirement, impossible of fulfilment, 
is not all. If it were, the climbing procession 
might stop. But up and up they rise, and 
once again the song bursts forth in deeper and 
more hopeful words, " He shall receive the 
blessing from Jehovah, and righteousness from 
the God of his salvation." Then that righteous- 
ness, which he who honestly attempts to comply 
with such requirements will soon find that he 
does not possess, is to be received from above, 
not elaborated from within ; is a gift from God, 
not a product of man's toils. God will make us 
pure, that we may dwell with Him. Nor is this 
all. The condition of receiving such a gift has 
been already partially set forth in the preceding 
clause, which seems to require righteousness to 
be possessed as the preliminary to receiving it. 
The paradox which thus results is inseparable 
from the stage of religious knowledge attained 
under the Mosaic Law. But the last words of 
the answer go far beyond it, and proclaim the 
special truth of the gospel, that the righteousness 
which fits for dwelling with God is given on the 
simple condition of seeking Him. To this desig- 
nation of the true worshippers is appended 



I 82 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

somewhat abruptly the one word " Jacob," which 
need neither be rendered as in the EngHsh 
version as an invocation, nor as in the margin, 
with an unnecessary and improbable supplement, 
'' O God of Jacob ; " but is best regarded as in 
apposition with the other descriptive clauses, and 
declaring, as we have found David doing already 
in previous psalms, that the characters portrayed 
in them, and these only, constituted the true 
Israel. 

This is the generation of them that seek Him, 

That seek Thy face — (this is) Jacob. 

And so the first question is answered, " Who are 
the men who dwell with God ? " — The pure, 
who receive righteousness, who seek Him, the 
true Israel. 

And now the procession has reached the front 
of the ancient city on the hill, and stands before 
the very walls and weather-beaten gates which 
Melchizedek may have passed through, and 
which had been barred against Israel till David s 
might had burst them. National triumph and 
glad worship are wonderfully blended in the 
summons which rings from the lips of the 
Levites without : " Lift up your heads, O ye 
gates ! and be ye lift up, ye doors (that have 



AS R'^FLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 83 

been from) of old ! " as if even their towering 
portals were too low, '^ and the King of glory- 
shall come in." What force in that name here, 
in this early song of the King ! How clearly he 
recognises his own derived power, and the real 
Monarch of whom he is but the shadowy repre- 
sentative ! The newly-conquered city is sum- 
moned to admit its true conqueror and sove- 
reign, whose throne is the ark, which was em- 
phatically named " the glory,'' "^ and in whose 
train the earthly king follows as a subject and 
a worshipper. Then, with wonderful dramatic 
force, a single voice from within the barred 
gates asks, like some suspicious warder, " Who 
then is the King of glory ? " With what a 
shout of proud confidence and triumphant 
memories of a hundred fields comes, ready and 
full, the crash of many voices in the answer, 
" Jehovah strong and mighty, Jehovah mighty 
in battle ! " How vividly the reluctance of an 
antagonistic world to yield to Israel and Israel's 
King, is represented in the repetition of the 
question in a form slightly more expressive of 

^ *' And she named the child I-chabod (Where is the glory?) 
saying, The glory is departed from Israel : because the ark of 
God was taken." — i Sa7n. iv. 21. 



184 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

ignorance and doubt, in answer to the reiterated 
summons, "Who is He, then, the King of glory ?" 
With what deepened intensity of triumph there 
peals, hoarse and deep, the choral shout, " The 
Lord of Hosts, He is the King of glory." That 
name which sets Him forth as Sovereign of the 
personal and impersonal forces of the universe 
— angels, and stars, and terrene creatures, all 
gathered in ordered ranks, embattled for His 
service — was a comparatively new name in 
Israel,*^ and brought with it thoughts of irresist- 
ible might in earth and heaven. It crashes 
like a catapult against the ancient gates ; and 
at that proclamation of the omnipotent name of 
the God who dwells with men, they grate back 
on their brazen hinges, and the ark of the Lord 
enters into its rest. 

" It has been asserted that this is the first introduction of the 
naine. (" Psalms Chronologically Arranged by Four Friends," 
p. 14). But it occurs in Hannah's vow (i Sam. i. 11): in 
Samuel's words to Saul (xv. 2) ; in David's reply to Goliath 
(xvii. 45). We have it also in Psalm lix. 5, which we regard as 
his earliest during his exile. Do the authors referred to consider 
these speeches in i Sam. as not authentic? 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 185 



XIL— THE KING— CONTINUED. 

THE second event recorded as important in 
the bright early years is the great pro- 
mise of the perpetuity of the kingdom in 
David's house. As soon as the king was firmly 
established and free from war, he remembered 
the ancient word which said, " When He giveth 
you rest from all your enemies round about, so 
that ye dwell in safety, then there shall be a 
place which the Lord your God shall choose 
to cause His name to dwell there " (Deut. 
xii. 10, 11). His own ease rebukes him; he 
regards his tranquillity not as a season for 
selfish indolence, but as a call to new forms 
of service. He might well have found in the 
many troubles and vicissitudes of his past life 
an excuse for luxurious repose now. But 
devout souls will consecrate their leisure as 
their toil to God, and will serve Him with 
thankful off'erings in peace whom they invoked 
with earnest cries in battle. Prosperity is 



I 86 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

harmless only when it is accepted as an oppor- 
tunity for fresh forms of devotion, not as an 
occasion for idle self-indulgence. So we read, 
with distinct verbal reference to the words 
already quoted, that " when the Lord had given 
him rest round about from all his enemies, 
the king said unto Nathan the prophet. See 
now, I dwell in an house of cedar, but the 
ark of God dwelleth in curtains." The impulse 
of generous devotion, which cannot bear to 
lavish more upon self than it gives to God, 
at first commended itself to the prophet ; but 
in the solitude of his nightly thoughts the 
higher wisdom speaks in his spirit, and the 
word of God gives him a message for the king. 
The narrative in 2 Sam. makes no mention of 
David's warlike life as unfitting him for the 
task, which we find from 2 Chron. was one 
reason why his purpose was set aside, but 
brings into prominence the thought that David's 
generous impulse was outrunning God's com- 
mandment, and that his ardour to serve was in 
some danger of forgetting his entire dependence 
on God, and of fancying that God would be the 
better for him. So the prophetic message re- 
minds him that the Lord had never, through 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 87 

all the centuries, asked for a house of cedar, 
and recalls the past life of David as having 
been wholly shaped and blessed by Him, while 
it pointedly inverts the king's proposal in its 
own grand promise, "The Lord telleth thee 
that He will make thee an house." Then 
follows the prediction of a son of David who 
should build the house, whose kingdom should 
be perpetual, whose transgressions should be 
corrected indeed, but never punished as those 
of the unhappy Saul ; and then, in emphatic 
and unmistakable words, the perpetuity of 
David's house, his kingdom, and his throne, 
is reiterated as the close of the whole. 

The wonderful burst of praise which sprang 
from David's heart in answer cannot be dealt 
with here ; but clearly from that time onwards 
a new element had been added to his hopes, 
and a new object presented to his faith. The 
prophecy of the Messiah enters upon a new 
stage, bearing a relation, as its successive stages, 
always unmistakably did, to the history which 
supplies a framework for it. Now for the first 
time can he be set forth as the king of Israel ; 
now the width of the promise which at first 
had embraced the seed of the woman, and then 



I 88 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

had been narrowed to the seed of Abraham, 
and thereafter probably to the tribe of Judah, 
is still further defined as to be fulfilled in the 
line of the house of David ; now the personal 
Messiah Himself begins to be discerned through 
the words which are to have a preparatory 
fulfilment, in itself prophetic, in the collective 
Davidic monarchs whose very office is itself 
also a prophecy. 

Many echoes of this new message ring through 
the later psalms of the king. His own dominion, 
his conquests, and his office, gradually became 
to himself a solemn prophecy of a mysterious 
descendant who should be really and fully all 
that he was in shadow and in part. As the 
experience of the exile, so that of the victorious 
monarch supplied the colours with which the 
spirit of prophecy in him painted ^' beforehand 
the suff*erings of Christ and the glory that 
should follow." In both classes of psalms we 
have two forms of the Messianic reference, the 
typical and the purely prophetic. In the former 
the events of David's own biography and the 
feelings of his own soul are so portrayed and 
expressed as to suggest his greater Son. In 
the latter, the personality of the psalmist 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I 89 

retreats into the background, and is at most 
only the starting-point for wails of sorrow or 
gleams of glory which far transcend anything 
in the life of the singer. There are portions, 
for instance, of the xxii. and Ixix. psalms which 
no torturing can force into correspondence with 
any of David's trials ; and in like manner there 
are paeans of victory and predictions of dominion 
which demand a grander interpretation than his 
own royalty or his hopes for his house can yield. 
Of course, if prophecy is impossible, there is no 
more to be said, but that in that case a con- 
siderable part of the Old Testament, including 
many of David's psalms, is unintelligible. 

Perhaps the clearest instance of distinct pro- 
phecy of the victorious dominion of the personal 
Messiah is the iioth psalm. In it we do see, no 
doubt, the influence of the psalmist's own history, 
shaping the image which rises before his soul. 
But the attributes of that king whom he 
beholds are not his attributes, nor those of any 
son of his who wore the crown in Israel. And 
whilst his own history gives the form, it is ^' the 
Spirit of Christ that was in " him which gives 
the substance, and transfigures the earthly 
monarchy into a heavenly dominion. We do 



I go THE LIFE OF DAVID 

not enter upon the question of the Davidic 
authorship of this psalm. Here we have not to 
depend upon Jewish superscriptions, but on the 
words of Him whose bare assertion should be 
" an end of all strife." Christ says that David 
wrote it Some of us are far enough behind the 
age to believe that what He said He meant, and 
that what He meant is truth. 

This psalm, then, being David's, can hardly 
be earlier than the time of Nathan's prophecy. 
There are traces in it of the influence of the history 
of the psalmist, giving, as we have said, form to 
the predictions. Perhaps we may see these in 
Zion being named as the seat of Messiah's sove- 
reignty and in the reference to Melchizedek, 
both of which points assume new force if we 
suppose that the ancient city over which that 
half-forgotten name once ruled had recently 
become his own. Possibly, too, his joy in 
exchanging his armour and kingly robe for the 
priest's ephod, when he brought up the ark to 
its rest, and his consciousness that in himself 
the regal and the sacerdotal offices did not 
blend, may have led him to meditations on the 
meaning of both, on the miseries that seemed to 
flow equally from their separation and from 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 1 Q I 

their union, which were the precursors of his 
hearing the Divine oath that, in the far-ofif 
future, they would be fused together in that 
mighty figure who was to repeat in higher 
fashion the union of functions which invested 
that dim King of Righteousness and Priest of 
God in the far-ofif past. He discerns that his 
support from the right hand of God, his sceptre 
which he swayed in Zion, his loyal people fused 
together into a unity at last, his triumphant war- 
fare on the nations around, are all but faint 
shadows of One who is to come. That solemn 
form on the horizon of hope is his Lord, the 
true King whose viceroy he was, the "bright 
consummate flower " for the sake of which the 
root has its being. And, as he sees the majestic 
lineaments shimmering through the facts of his 
own history, like some hidden fire toiling in a 
narrow space ere it leaps into ruddy spires that 
burst their bonds and flame heaven high, he is 
borne onwards by the prophetic impulse, and 
the Spirit of God speaks through his tongue 
words which have no meaning unless their theme 
be a Divine ruler and priest for all the world. 

He begins with the solemn words with which 
a prophetic message is wont to be announced. 



192 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

thus at the outset stamping on the psalm its 
true character. The " oracle " or " word of 
Jehovah unto my Lord," which he heard, is a 
new revelation made to him from the heavens. 
He is taken up and listens to the Divine voice 
calling to His right hand, to the most intimate 
communion with Himself, and to wielding the 
energies of omnipotence — Him whom David 
knew to be his lord. And when that Divine 
voice ceases, its mandate having been fulfilled, 
the prophetic spirit in the seer hymns the coro- 
nation anthem of the monarch enthroned by 
the side of the majesty in the heavens. "The 
sceptre of Thy strength will Jehovah send out 
of Zion. Rule Thou in the midst of Thine 
enemies." In singular juxtaposition are the 
throne at God's right hand and the sceptre 
— the emblem of sovereignty — issuing from 
Zion, a dominion realised on earth by a monarch 
in the heavens, a dominion the centre of which 
is Zion, and the undefined extent universal. It 
is a monarchy, too, established in the midst of 
enemies, sustained in spite of antagonism not 
only by the power of Jehovah, but by the 
activity of the sovereign's own ^* rule." It is a 
dominion for the maintenance of which devout 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 193 

souls Will burst into prayer, and the most 
powerful can bring but their aspirations. But 
the vision includes more than the warrior king 
and his foes. Imbedded, as it were, in the very 
heart of the description of the former comes the 
portraiture of his subjects, for a witness how 
close is the union between Him and them, and 
how inseparable from His glories are those who 
serve Him. They are characterised in a three- 
fold manner. " Thy people (shall be) willing in 
the day of Thine array." The army is being 
mustered.* They are not mercenaries, nor 
pressed men. They flock gladly to the stan- 
dard, like the warriors celebrated of old in 
Deborah's chant of victory, who "willingly 
offered themselves." The word of our psalm 
might be translated "freewill offerings," and the 
whole clause carries us into the very heart of 
that great truth, that glad consecration and 
grateful self-surrender is the one bond which 
knits us to the Captain of our salvation who 

* The word translated '* power" in our version, has the 
same double meaning as that has in old English, or as " force " 
has now, sometimes signifying ' * strength " and sometimes an 
" army.'' The latter is the more appropriate here. "The day 
of Thine army " will then be equivalent to the day of mustering 
the troops. 

N 



194 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

gave Himself for us, to the meek Monarch 
whose crown is of thorns and His sceptre a reed, 
for tokens that His dominion rests on suffering 
and is wielded in gentleness. The next words 
should be punctuated as a separate clause, co- 
ordinate with the former, and adding another 
feature to the description of the army. '' In the 
beauties of holiness " is a common name for the 
dress of the priests : the idea conveyed is that 
the army is an army of priests, as the king him- 
self is a priest. They are clothed, not in mail 
and warlike attire, but in " fine linen clean and 
white," like the armies which a later prophet 
saw following the Lord of lords. Their war- 
fare is not to be by force and cruelty, nor their 
conquests bloody ; but while soldiers they are 
to be priests, their weapons purity and devotion, 
their merciful struggle to bring men to God, 
and to mirror God to men. Round the one 
image gather all ideas of discipline, courage, 
consecration to a cause, loyalty to a leader ; 
round the other, all thoughts of gentleness, of 
an atmosphere of devotion calm and still as the 
holy place, of stainless character. Christ's ser- 
vants must be both soldiers and priests, like 
some of those knightly orders who bore the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 1 95 

cross on helmet and shield, and shaped the very 
hilts of their swords into its likeness. And 
these soldier -priests are described by yet 
another image, '' From the womb of the morn- 
ing thou hast the dew of thy youth," where we 
are to regard the last word as used in a col- 
lective sense, and equivalent to "Thy young 
warriors." They are like the dew sparkling in 
infinite globelets on every blade of grass, hang- 
ing gems on every bit of dead wood, formed 
in secret silence, refliecting the sunlight, and, 
though the single drops be small and feeble, 
yet together freshening the thirsty world. So, 
formed by an unseen and mysterious power, one 
by one insignificant, but in the whole mighty, 
mirroring God and quickening and beautifying 
the worn world, the servants of the priest-king 
are to be " in the midst of many people like the 
dew from the Lord." 

Another solemn word from the lips of God 
begins the second half of the psalm. "Jehovah 
swears," gives the sanction and guarantee of His 
own nature, puts in pledge His own being 
for the fulfilment of the promise. And 
that which He swears is a new thing in 
the earth. The blending of the royal and 
priestly offices in the Messiah, and the eternal 



196 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

duration in Him of both, is a distinct advance- 
ment in the development of Messianic prophecy. 
The historical occasion for it may indeed be 
connected with David's kingship and conquest 
of Melchizedek's city ; but the real source of it 
is a direct predictive inspiration. We have here 
not merely the devout psalmist meditating on 
the truths revealed before his day, but the 
prophet receiving a new word from God unheard 
by mortal ears, and far transcending even the 
promises made to him by Nathan. There is 
but one person to whom it can apply, who sits 
as a priest upon his throne, who builds the 
temple of the Lord (Zech. vi. 12, 13). 

As the former Divine word, so this is followed 
by the prophet's rapturous answer, which carries 
on the portraiture of the priest-king. There is 
some doubt as to the person addressed in these 
later verses. ''The Lord at thy right hand 
crushes kings in the day of His wrath.'' Whose 
right hand ? The answer generally given is, 
" The Messiah's." Who is the Lord that smites 
the petty kinglets of earth ? The answer 
generally given is, " God." But it is far more 
dramatic, avoids an awkward abruptness in the 
change of persons in the last verse, and brings 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. I97 

out a striking contrast with the previous half, if 
we take the opposite view, and suppose Jehovah 
addressed and the Messiah spoken of through- 
out. Then the first Divine word is followed by 
the prophetic invocation of the exalted Messiah 
throned at the right hand and expecting till 
His enemies be made His footstool. The second 
is followed by the prophetic invocation of 
Jehovah, and describes the Lord Messiah at 
God's right hand as before, but instead of longer 
waiting He now flames forth in all the resistless 
energy of a conqueror. The day of His array 
is succeeded by the day of His wrath. He 
crushes earth's monarchies. The psalmist's eye 
sees the whole earth one great battle-field. 
" (It is) full of corpses. He wounds the head 
over wide lands," where there may possibly be 
a reference to the first vague dawning of a hope 
which God's mercy had let lighten on man's 
horizon — " He shall bruise thy head," or the 
word may be used as a collective expression 
for rulers, as the parallelism with the previous 
verse requires. Thus striding on to victory 
across the prostrate foe, and pursuing the flying 
relics of their power, " He drinks of the brook 
in the way, therefore shall He lift up the head," 



198 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

words which are somewhat difficult, however in- 
terpreted. If, with the majority of modern 
commentators, we take them as a picturesque 
embodiment of eager haste in the pursuit, the 
conqueror "faint, yet pursuing," and stooping 
for a moment to drink, then hurrying on with 
renewed strength after the fugitives, one can 
scarcely help feeling that such a close to such a 
psalm is trivial and liker the artificial play of 
fancy than the work of the prophetic spirit, to 
say nothing of the fact that there is nothing 
about pursuit in the psalm. If we fall back on 
the older interpretation, which sees in the words 
a prophecy of the sufferings of the Messiah 
who tastes death and drinks of the cup of 
sorrows, and therefore is highly exalted, we 
get a meaning which worthily crowns the 
psalm, but seems to break somewhat abruptly 
the sequence of thought, and to force the 
metaphor of drinking of the brook into some- 
what strained parallelism with the very different 
New Testament images just named. But the 
doubt we must leave over these final words does 
not diminish the preciousness of this psalm as a 
clear, articulate prophecy from David's lips of 
David's Son, whom he had learned to know 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 1 99 

through the experiences and facts of his own 
life. He had climbed through sufferings to his 
throne. God had exalted him and given him 
victory, and surrounded him with a loyal people. 
But he was only a shadow ; limitations and 
imperfections surrounded his office and weak- 
ened himself; half of the Divine counsel of 
peace could not be mirrored in his functions at 
all, and death lay ahead of him. So his glory 
and his feebleness alike taught him that " one 
mightier than " he must be coming behind him, 
" the latchet of whose shoes he was not worthy 
to unloose" — the true King of Israel, to bear 
witness to whom was his highest honour. 

The third characteristic of the first seventeen 
years of David's reign is his successful wars with 
surrounding nations. The gloomy days of 
defeat and subjugation which had darkened the 
closing years of Saul are over now, and blow 
after blow falls with stunning rapidity on the 
amazed enemies. The narrative almost pants 
for breath as it tells with hurry and pride how, 
south, and east, and north, the " lion of the tribe of 
Judah" sprang from his fastness, and smote 
Philistia, Edom, Moab, Ammon, Amalek, Da- 
mascus, and the Syrians beyond, even to the 



200 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

Euphrates ; and the bounding courage of king 
and people, and the unity of heart and hand 
with which they stood shoulder to shoulder in 
many a bloody field, ring through the psalms of 
this period. Whatever higher meaning may be 
attached to them, their roots are firm in the soil 
of actual history, and they are first of all the 
war-songs of a nation. That being so, that 
they should also be inspired hymns for the 
church in all ages will present no difficulty nor 
afford any consecration to modern warfare, if 
the progressive character of revelation be duly 
kept in mind. There is a whole series of such 
psalms, such as xx., xxi., Ix., and probably Ixviii. 
We cannot venture in our limited space on any 
analysis of the last of these. It is a splendid 
burst of national triumph and devout praise, full 
of martial ardour, throbbing with lofty consci- 
ousness of God's dwelling in Israel, abounding 
with allusions to the ancient victories of the 
people, and world-wide in its anticipations of 
future triumph. How strange the history of its 
opening words has been ! Through the battle 
smoke of how many a field they have rung ! 
On the plains of the Palatinate, from the lips of 
Cromwell's Ironsides, and from the poor pea- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 20I 

sants that went to death on many a bleak moor 
for Christ's crown and covenant, to the Doric 
music of their rude chant — 

^^ Let God arise, and scattered 
Let all His enemies be ; 
And let all those that do Him hate, 
Before His presence flee." 

The sixtieth psalm is assigned to David after 
Joab's signal victory over the Edomites (2 Sam. 
viii.). It agrees very well with that date, 
though the earlier verses have a wailing tone so 
deep over recent disasters, so great that one is 
almost inclined to suppose that they come from 
a later hand than his. But after the first verses 
all is warlike energy and triumph. How the glad 
thought of ruling over a united people dances 
in the swift words, " I will rejoice, I will divide 
Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth ; " 
he has, as it were, repeated Joshua's conquest 
and division of the land, and the ancient his- 
torical sites that fill a conspicuous place in the 
history of his great ancestor are in his power. 
^' Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine, Ephraim 
also is the defence of my head, Judah my staff" 
of command." He looks eastward to the woods 
and pastoral uplands across the Jordan, whose 



202 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

inhabitants had been but loosely attached to 
the western portion of the nation, and triumphs 
in knowing that Gilead and Manasseh own his 
sway. The foremost tribes on this side the river 
are to him like the armour and equipments of a 
conqueror ; he wears the might of Ephraim, 
the natural head of the northern region, as his 
helmet, and he grasps the power of Judah 
as his baton of command or sceptre of kingly 
rule (Gen. xlix. lo). 

Thus, strong in the possession of a united 
kingdom, his flashing eye turns to his enemies, 
and a stern joy, mingled with contempt, blazes 
up as he sees them reduced to menial offices 
and trembling before him. "Moab (is) my 
washing-basin ; to Edom will I fling my shoe ; 
because of me, Philistia, cry out '* (in fear). The 
three ancestral foes that hung on Israel's 
southern border from east to west are subdued. 
He will make of one " a vessel of dishonour " to 
wash his feet, soiled with battle ; he will throw 
his shoes to another the while, as one would to 
a slave to take care of ; and the third, expecting 
a like fate, shrieks out in fear of the impending 
vengeance. He pants for new victories, " Who 
will bring me into (the) strong city .^" probably 
the yet unsubdued Petra, hidden away in its 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 203 

tortuous ravine, with but one perilous path 
through the gorge. And at last all the triumph 
of victory rises to a higher region of thought in 
the closing words, which lay bare the secret of 
his strength, and breathe the true spirit of 
the soldier of Jehovah. "In God we shall do 
valiantly ; and He, even He, shall tread down 
our enemies." 

The twentieth psalm, another of these stirring 
war-songs, is in that choral manner which we 
have already seen in psalm xxiv., and the adop- 
tion of which was probably connected with 
David's careful organization of " the serviced 
song." It is all ablaze with the light of battle 
and the glow of loyal love. 

The army, ready drawn up for action, as we 
may fancy, prays for the king, who, according to 
custom, brings sacrifices and offerings before the 
fight. " Jehovah hear thee in the day of trouble ; 
the name of the God of Jacob defend thee, send 
thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen 
thee out of Zion, remember all thine offerings, 
and accept thy burnt sacrifice." Then, as they 
wave their standards in the sunshine, or plant 
before the ranks of each tribe its cognizance, to 
be defended to the death, the hoarse shout rises 
from the files, " In the name of our God we will 



204 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

set up (or wave) our banners." Then the 
single voice of the king speaks, rejoicing in his 
soldiers* devotion, which he accepts as an omen 
that his sacrifice has not been in vain : " Now 
know I that Jehovah saveth His anointed. He 
will hear him from the heaven of His holiness 
with the strength of the salvation of His right 
hand ; " not merely from a God dwelling in Zion, 
according to language of the previous prayer, 
but from the Lord in the heavens, will the 
strength come. Then again the chorus of the 
host exclaims, as they look across the field to 
the chariots and cavalry of the foe — forces which 
Israel seldom used — ^^ These (boast ^) of chariots, 
and those of horses, and we, of the name of 
Jehovah, our God, do we boast." Ere a sword 
has been drawn, they see the enemy scattered. 
'' They are brought down and fallen ; and we, 
we are risen and stand upright.'' Then one 
earnest cry to God, one more thought of the 
true monarch of Israel, whom David would 
teach them to feel he only shadowed ; and 
with the prayer, "Jehovah! save! Let the King 
hear us in the day when we cry," ringing like 
the long trumpet blast that sounds for the 
charge, they dash forth to victory ! 

* Lit. *' make mention of " or *' commemorate. '^ 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2O5 



XIII.— THE TEARS OF THE PENITENT. 

ADVERSITY had taught David self-re- 
restraint, had braced his soul, had driven 
him to grasp firmly the hand of God. And 
prosperity had seemed for nearly twenty years 
but to perfect the lessons. Gratitude had fol- 
lowed deliverance, and the sunshine after the 
rain had brought out the fragrance of devotion 
and the blossoms of glad songs. A good man, 
and still more a man of David's age at the date 
of his great crime, seldom falls so low, unless 
there has been previous, perhaps unconscious, 
relaxation of the girded loins, and negligence of 
the untrimmed lamp. The sensitive nature of 
the psalmist was indeed not unlikely to yield to 
the sudden force of such a temptation as con- 
quered him, but we can scarcely conceive of its 
having done so without a previous decay of his 
religious life, hidden most likely from himself. 
And the source of that decay may probably be 
found in self-indulgence, fostered by ease, and 



206 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

by long years of command. The actual fall 
into sin seems to have been begun by slothful 
abdication of his functions as captain of Israel. 
It is perhaps not without bitter emphasis that 
the narrative introduces it by telling us that, 
"at the time when kings go forth to battle/' 
David contented himself with sending his troops 
against Ammon, and "tarried still at Jeru- 
salem." At all events, the story brings into 
sharp contrast the levy en masse, encamped 
round Rabbath, and their natural head, who had 
once been so ready to take his share of blows 
and privations, loitering behind, taking his 
quiet siesta in the hot hours after noon, as if 
there had been no soldiers of his sweltering in 
their armour, and rising from his bed to stroll 
on his palace roof, and peer into the household 
privacies below, as if his heart had no interest 
in the grim tussle going on behind the hills 
that he could almost see from his height, as 
they grew purple in the evening twilight. He 
has fallen to the level of an Eastern despot, and 
has lost his sense of the responsibilities of his 
office. Such loosening of the tension of his 
moral nature as is indicated in his absence from 
the field, during what was evidently a very 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 207 

severe as well as a long struggle, prepared the 
way for the dismal headlong plunge into sin. 

The story is told in all its hideousness, with- 
out palliation or reserve, without comment or 
heightening, in that stern judicial fashion so 
characteristic of the Bible records of its greatest 
characters. Every step is narrated without a 
trace of softening, and without a word of emo- 
tion. Not a single ugly detail is spared. The 
portraiture is as vivid as ever. Bathsheba's will- 
ing complicity, her punctilious observance of 
ceremonial propriety while she is trampling 
under foot her holiest obligations; the fatal 
necessity which drags sin after sin, and summons 
up murder to hide, if it be possible, the foul 
form of adultery ; the stinging rebuke in the con- 
duct of Uriah, who, Hittite as he was, has a 
more chivalrous, not to say devout, shrinking 
from personal ease while his comrades and the 
ark are in the field, than the king has ; the mean 
treason, the degradation implied in getting into 
Joab's power ; the cynical plainness of the 
murderous letter, in which a hardened conscience 
names his purposed evil by its true name ; the 
contemptuous measure of his master which 
Joab takes in his message, the king's indifference 



208 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

to the loss of his men so long as Uriah is out of 
the way ; the solemn platitudes with which he 
pretends to console his tool for the check of his 
troops ; and the hideous haste with which, after 
her scrupulous " mourning " for one week, Bath- 
sheba threw herself again into David's arms ; — 
all these particulars, and every particular an 
aggravation, stand out for ever, as men's most 
hidden evil will one day do, in the clear, un- 
pitying, unmistakable light of the Divine record. 
What a story it is ! 

This saint of nearly fifty years of age, bound 
to God by ties which he rapturously felt and 
acknowledged, whose words have been the very 
breath of devotion for every devout heart, for- 
gets his longings after righteousness, flings 
away the joys of Divine communion, darkens 
his soul, ends his prosperity, brings down upon 
his head for all his remaining years a cataract 
of calamities, and makes his name and his re- 
ligion a target for the barbed sarcasms of each 
succeeding generation of scoffers. "All the 
fences and their whole array," which God's 
mercies and his own past had reared, "one 
cunning sin sweeps quite away." Every obliga- 
tion of his office, as every grace of his charac- 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 209 

ter, is trodden under foot by the wild beast 
roused in his breast. As man, as king, as 
soldier, he is found wanting. Lust and treason, 
and craft and murder, are goodly companions 
for him who had said, " I will walk within my 
house with a perfect heart. I will set no wicked 
thing before mine eyes." Why should we dwell 
on the wretched story ? Because it teaches us, 
as no other page in the history of God's church 
does, how the alchemy of Divine love can ex- 
tract sweet perfumes of penitence and praise out 
of the filth of sin ; and therefore, though we 
turn with loathing from David's sin, we have to 
bless God for the record of it, and for the 
lessons of hope that come from David's pardon. 
To many a sin-tortured soul since then, the 
two psalms (li., xxxii.), all blotted with tears, in 
which he has sobbed out his penitence, have 
been as footsteps in a great and terrible wilder- 
ness. They are too familiar to need, and too 
sacred to bear, many words here, but we may 
briefly note some points connected with them 
— especially those which assist us in forming 
some image of the psalmist's state of mind 
after his transgression. It may be observed 
that of these two psalms, the fifty-first is evi- 

O 



2 TO THE LIFE OF DAVID 

dently earlier than the thirty-second. In the 
former we see the fallen man struggling up out 
of the "horrible pit and miry clay;" in the 
latter he stands upon the rock, with a new song 
in his mouth, even the blessedness of him 
"whose sin is covered." It appears also that 
both must be dated after the sharp thrust of 
God's lancet which Nathan drove into his con- 
science, and the healing balsam of God's assur- 
ance of forgiveness which Nathan laid upon his 
heart. The passionate cries of the psalm are 
the echo of the Divine promise — the effort of 
his faith to grasp and keep the merciful gift of 
pardon. The consciousness of forgiveness is 
the basis of the prayer for forgiveness. 

Somewhere about a year passed between the 
crime and the message of Nathan. And what 
sort of a year it was the psalms tell us. The 
coarse satisfactions of his sin could not long 
content him, as they might have done a lower 
type of man. Nobody buys a little passing 
pleasure in evil at so dear a rate, or keeps it 
for so short a time as a good man. He cannot 
make himself as others. " That which cometh 
into your mind shall not be at all, in that ye 
say, We will be as the families of the nations, 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2 I J 

which serve wood and stone/' Old habits 
quickly reassert their force, conscience soon 
lifts again its solemn voice ; and while worse 
men are enjoying the strong-flavoured meats 
on sin's table, the servant of God, who has been 
seduced to prefer them for a moment to the 
" light bread " from heaven, tastes them already 
bitter in his mouth. He may be far from true 
repentance, but he will very soon know remorse. 
Months may pass before he can feel again the 
calm joys of God, but disgust with himself 
and with his sin will quickly fill his soul. No 
more vivid picture of such a state has ever been 
drawn, than is found in the psalms of this period. 
They tell of sullen " silence ; *' dust had settled 
on the strings of his harp, as on helmet and 
sword. He will not speak to God of his sin, 
and there is nothing else that he can speak of 
They tell of his " roaring all the day long " — 
the groan of anguish forced from his yet un- 
softened spirit. Day and night God's heavy 
hand weighed him down ; the consciousness of 
that power, whose gentleness had once holden 
him up, crushed, but did not melt him. Like 
some heated iron, its heaviness scorched as well 
as bruised, and his moisture — all the dew and 



2 I 2 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

freshness of his life — was dried up at its touch 
and turned into dusty, cracking drought, that 
chaps the hard earth, and shrinks the streamlets, 
and burns to brown powder the tender herbage 
(Ps. xxxii.). Body and mind seem both to be 
included in this wonderful description, in which 
obstinate dumbness, constant torture, dread of 
God, and not one softening drop of penitence 
fill the dry and dusty heart, while " bones wax- 
ing old," or, as the word might be rendered, 
*' rotting," sleepless nights, and perhaps the 
burning heat of disease, are hinted at as the 
accompaniments of the soul-agony. It is pos- 
sible that similar allusions to actual bodily 
illness are to be found in another psalm, pro- 
bably referring to the same period, and present- 
ing striking parallelisms of expression (Ps. vi.), 
" Have mercy upon me, Jehovah, for I languish 
(fade away) ; heal me, for my bones are 
affrighted. My soul is also sore vexed. I 
am weary with my groaning; every night 
make I my bed to swim. I water my couch 
with my tears." The similar phrase, too, in 
psalm fifty-one, " The bones which Thou hast 
broken," may have a similar application. Thus, 
sick in body and soul, he dragged through a 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2 I 3 

weary year — ashamed of his guilty dalliance, 
wretched in his self-accusations, afraid of God, 
and skulking in the recesses of his palace from 
the sight of his people. A goodly price he had 
sold integrity for. The bread had been sweet 
for a moment, but how quickly his " mouth is 
filled with gravel" (Proverbs xx. 17). David 
learned, what we all learn (and the holier a 
man is, the more speedily and sharply does 
the lesson follow on the heels of his sin), that 
every transgression is a blunder, that we never 
get the satisfaction which we expect from any 
sin, or if we do, we get something with it which 
spoils it all. A nauseous drug is added to the 
exciting, intoxicating drink which temptation 
offers, and though its flavour is at first disguised 
by the pleasanter taste of the sin, its bitterness 
is persistent though slow, and clings to the 
palate long after that has faded utterly. 

Into this dreary life Nathan s message comes 
with merciful rebuke. The prompt severity of 
David's judgment against the selfish sinner of 
the inimitable apologue may be a subtle indi- 
cation of his troubled conscience, which fancies 
some atonement for his own sin in stern repres- 
sion of that of others ; for consciousness of evil 



2 14 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

may sometimes sting into harshness as well as 
soften to lenity, and sinful man is a sterner 
judge than the righteous God. The answer of 
Nathan is a perfect example of the Divine way 
of convincing of sin. There is first the plain 
charge pressed home on the individual con- 
science, '' Thou art the man." Then follows, 
not reproach nor further deepening of the 
blackness of the deed, but a tender enumera- 
tion of God's great benefits, whereon is built 
the solemn question, *' Wherefore hast thou 
despised the commandment of the Lord, to 
do evil in His sight ? " The contemplation of 
God's faithful love, and of the all-sufificient gifts 
which it bestows, makes every transgression 
irrational as well as ungrateful, and turns re- 
morse, which consumes like the hot wind of 
the wilderness, into tearful repentance which 
refreshes the soul. When God has been seen 
loving and bestowing ere He commands and 
requires, it is profitable to hold the image of 
the man's evil in all its ugliness close up to his 
eyes ; and so the bald facts are repeated next 
in the fewest, strongest words. Nor can the 
message close until a rigid law of retribution 
has been proclaimed, the slow operation of 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2 I 5 

which will filter bitterness and shame through 
all his life. " And David said unto Nathan, 
I have sinned against the Lord." Two words 
(in the Hebrew) make the transition from 
sullen misery to real though shaded peace. 
No lengthened outpouring, no accumulation 
of self-reproach; he is too deeply moved for 
many words, which he knows God does not 
need. More would have been less. All is con- 
tained in that one sob, in which the whole 
frostwork of these weary months breaks up 
and rolls away, swept before the strong flood. 
And as brief and simple as the confession, is 
the response, "And Nathan said unto David, 
The Lord also hath put away thy sin." How 
full and unconditional the blessing bestowed 
in these few words ; how swift and sufficient 
the answer ! So the long estrangement is 
ended. Thus simple and Divine is the manner 
of pardon. In such short compass may the 
turning point of a life lie ! But while confes- 
sion and forgiveness heal the breach between 
God and David, pardon is not impunity, and 
the same sentence which bestows the remission 
of sin announces the exaction of a penalty. 
The judgments threatened a moment before — 



2 I 6 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

a moment so far removed now to David's con- 
sciousness that it would look as if an age had 
passed — are not withdrawn, and another is 
added, the death of Bathsheba's infant. God 
loves His servants too well to " suffer sin upon 
them," and the freest forgiveness and the 
happiest consciousness of it may consist with 
the loving infliction and the submissive bearing 
of pains, which are no longer the strokes of an 
avenging judge, but the chastisements of a 
gracious father. 

The fifty-first psalm must, we think, be con- 
ceived of as following soon after Nathan's 
mission. There may be echoes of the prophet's 
stern question, "Wherefore hast thou despised 
the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in 
His sight.?" and of the confession, "I have 
sinned against the Lord," in the words, "Against 
Thee, Thee only have I sinned, and done evil 
in Thy sight " (ver. 4), though perhaps the 
expressions are not so peculiar as to make 
the allusion certain. But, at all events, the 
penitence and prayers of the psalm can scarcely 
be supposed to have preceded the date of the 
historical narrative, which clearly implies that 
the rebuke of the seer was the first thing that 
broke up the dumb misery of unrepented sin. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2 I 7 

Although the psalm is one long cry for 
pardon and restoration, one can discern an 
order and progress in its petitions — the order, 
not of an artificial reproduction of a past mood 
of mind, but the instinctive order in which the 
emotion of contrite desire will ever pour itself 
forth. In the psalm all begins, as all begins in 
fact, with the grounding of the cry for favour 
on "Thy loving-kindness," "the multitude of 
Thy tender mercies ; " the one plea that avails 
with God, whose love is its own motive and its 
own measure, whose past acts are the standard 
for all His future, whose compassions, in their 
innumerable numbers, are more than the sum 
of our transgressions, though these be "more 
than the hairs of our head." Beginning 
with God's mercy, the penitent soul can 
learn to look next upon its own sin 
in all its aspects of evil. The depth and 
intensity of the psalmist's loathing of self is 
wonderfully expressed in his words for his 
crime. He speaks of his " transgressions " and 
of his " sin." Looked at in one way, he sees 
the separate acts of which he had been guilty 
— lust, fraud, treachery, murder : looked at in 
another, he sees them all knotted together, in 



2l8 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

one inextricable tangle of forked, hissing 
tongues, like the serpent locks that coil and 
twist round a Gorgon head. No sin dwells 
alone ; the separate acts have a common root, 
and the whole is matted together like the green 
growth on a stagnant pond, so that, by whatever 
filament it is grasped, the whole mass is drawn 
towards you. And a profound insight into the 
essence and character of sin lies in the accumu- 
lated synonyms. It is "transgression," or, as 
the word might be rendered, " rebellion " — not 
the mere breach of an impersonal law, not 
merely an infraction of " the constitution of our 
nature " — but the rising of a subject will against 
its true king, disobedience to a person as well as 
contravention of a standard. It is " iniquity " — 
perversion or distortion — a word which expresses 
the same metaphor as is found in many lan- 
guages, namely, crookedness as descriptive of 
deeds which depart from the perfect line of right. 
It is ''sin," i.e., " missing one's aim ; " in which 
profound word is contained the truth that all 
sin is a blunder, shooting wide of the true goal, 
if regard be had to the end of our being, and not 
less wide if regard be had to our happiness. It 
ever misses the mark ; and the epitaph might 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2 1 9 

be written over every sinner who seeks pleasure 
at the price of righteousness, " Thou fool." 

Nor less pregnant with meaning is the psalm- 
ist's emphatic acknowledgment, "Against Thee, 
Thee only have I sinned." He is not content 
with looking upon his evil in itself, or in relation 
only to the people who had suffered by it ; he 
thinks of it in relation to God. He had been 
guilty of crimes against Bathsheba and Uriah, 
and even the rough soldier whom he made his 
tool, as well as against his whole subjects ; but, 
dark as these were, they assumed their true 
character only when they were discerned as done 
against God. "Sin," in its full sense, implies 
"God" as its correlative. We transgress against 
each other, but we sin against Him. 

Nor does the psalmist stop here. He has 
acknowledged the tangled multiplicity and 
dreadful unity of his evil, he has seen its inmost 
character, he has learned to bring his deed into 
connection with God ; what remains still to be 
confessed ? He laments, and that not as ex- 
tenuation (though it be explanation), but as 
aggravation, the sinful nature in which he had 
been born. The deeds had come from a source 
— a bitter fountain had welled out this blackness. 



220 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

He himself is evil, therefore he has done evil. 
The sin is his ; he will not contest his full re- 
sponsibility ; and its foul characteristics declare 
the inward foulness from which it has flowed — 
and that foulness is himself. Does he therefore 
think that he is less to blame ? By no means. 
His acknowledgment of an evil nature is the 
very deepest of his confessions, and leads not to 
a palliation of his guilt, but to a cry to Him who 
alone can heal the inward wound ; and as He 
can purge away the transgressions, can likewise 
stanch their source, and give him to feel within 
" that he is healed from that plague." 

The same intensity of feeling expressed 
by the use of so many words for sin is 
revealed also in the reiterated synonyms 
for pardon. The prayer comes from his 
lips over and over again, not because he 
thinks that he shall be heard for his much 
speaking, but because of the earnestness of his 
longing. Such repetitions are signs of the per- 
sistence of faith, while others, though they last 
like the prayers of Baal's priests, " from morning 
till the time of the evening sacrifice," indicate 
only the suppliant's doubt. David prays that 
his sins may be "blotted out," in which petition 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2 2 I 

they are conceived as recorded against him in 
the archives of the heavens ; that he may be 
" washed " from them, in which they are con- 
ceived as foul stains upon himself, needing for 
their removal hard rubbing and beating (for 
such is, according to some commentators, the 
force of the word) ; that he may be " cleansed " 
— the technical word for the priestly cleansing 
of the leper, and declaring him clear of the 
taint. He also, with similar recurrence to the 
Mosaic symbols, prays that he may be " purged 
with hyssop." There is a pathetic appropriate- 
ness in the petition, for not only lepers, but 
those who had become defiled by contact 
with a dead body, were thus purified ; and on 
whom did the taint of corruption cleave as on 
the murderer of Uriah ? The prayer, too, is 
even more remarkable in the original, which 
employs a verb formed from the word for 
" sin ; " " and if in our language that were a 
word in use, it might be translated, ^ Thou shalt 
un-sin me.' "^ 

In the midst of these abased confessions and 
cries for pardon there comes with wonderful 
force and beauty the bold prayer for restoration 

* Donne's Sermons, quoted in Perowne, in. loc. 



2 22 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

to "joy and gladness " — an indication surely of 
more than ordinary confidence in the full mercy 
of God, which would efface all the consequences 
of his sin. 

And following upon them are petitions for 
sanctifying, reiterated and many-sided, like 
those that have preceded. Three pairs of 
clauses contain these, in each of which the 
second member of the clause asks for the infu- 
sion into his spirit of some grace from God — 
that he may possess a " steadfast spirit," " Thy 
Holy Spirit," " a willing spirit." It is perhaps 
not an accident that the central petition of the 
three is the one which most clearly expresses 
the thought which all imply — that the human 
spirit can only be renewed and hallowed by 
the entrance into it of the Divine. We are not 
to commit the theological anachronism which 
has been applied with such evil effect to the 
whole Old Testament, and suppose that David 
meant by that central clause in his prayer for 
renewal all that we mean by it ; but he meant, 
at least, that his spiritual nature could be made 
to love righteousness and hate iniquity by none 
other power than God's breathing on it. If we 
may venture to regard this as the heart of the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 22$ 

series, the other two on either side of it may be 
conceived as its consequences. It will then be 
" a right spirit," or, as the word means, a stead- 
fast spirit, strong to resist, not swept away by 
surges of passion, nor shaken by terrors of re- 
morse, but calm, tenacious, and resolved, press- 
ing on in the path of holiness, and immovable 
with the immobility of those who are rooted in 
God and goodness. It will be a free, or "a 
willing spirit," ready for all joyful service of 
thankfulness, and so penetrated with the love of 
his God that he will delight to do His will, and 
carry the law charactered in the spontaneous 
impulses of his renewed nature. Not without 
profound meaning does the psalmist seem to 
recur in his hour of penitence to the tragic fate 
of his predecessor in the monarchy, to whom, as 
to himself, had been given by the same anoint- 
ing, the same gift of "the Spirit of God.'* Re- 
membering how the holy chrism had faded from 
the raven locks of Saul long before his bloody 
head had been sent round Philistine cities to 
glut their revenge, and knowing that if God 
were " strict to mark iniquity," the gift which 
had been withdraw^n from Saul would not be 
continued to himself, he prays, not as anointed 



2 24 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

monarch only, but as sinful man, "Take not 
Thy Holy Spirit from me." As before he had 
ventured to ask for the joy of forgiveness, so 
now he pleads once more for " the joy of Thy 
salvation/' which comes from cleansing, from 
conscious fellowship — which he had so long and 
deeply felt, which for so many months had been 
hid from him by the mists of his own sin. The 
psalmist's natural buoyancy, the gladness which 
was an inseparable part of his religion, and had 
rung from his harp in many an hour of peril, 
the bold width of his desires, grounded on the 
clear breadth of his faith in God's perfect for- 
giveness, are all expressed in such a prayer 
from such lips at such a time, and may well be 
pondered and imitated by us. 

The lowly prayer which we have been tracing 
rises ere its close to a vow of renewed praise. It 
is very beautiful to note how the poet nature, as 
well as the consciousness of a Divine function, 
unite in the resolve that crowns the psalm. To 
David no tribute that he could bring to God 
seemed so little unworthy — none to himself so 
joyous — as the music of his harp, and the melody 
of his songs ; nor was any part of his kingly 
office so lofty in his estimation as his calling to 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 2 25 

proclaim in glowing words the name of the 
Lord, that men might learn to love. His 
earliest song in exile had closed with a like 
vow. It had been well fulfilled for many a 
year ; but these last doleful months had silenced 
all his praise. Now, as hope begins to shine 
upon him once more, the frost which had stilled 
the stream of his devotion is melting, and as he 
remembers his glad songs of old, and this 
miserable dumbness, his final prayer is, "O 
Lord, open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall 
show forth Thy praise.'* 

^ The same consciousness of sin, which we have 
found in a previous verse discerning the true 
significance of ceremonial purification, leads 
also to the recognition of the insufficiency of 
outward sacrifices— a thought which is not, as 
some modern critics would fain make it, the 
product of the latest age of Judaism, but appears 
occasionally through the whole of the history, 
and indicates not the date, but the spiritual 
elevation of its utterer. David sets it on thevery 
summit of his psalm, to sparkle there like some 
stone of price. The rich jewel which he has 
brought up from the abyss of degradation is 
that truth which has shone out from its setting 

P 



2 26 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

here over three millenniums : " The sacrifices of 
God are a broken spirit ; a broken and a contrite 
heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise." 

The words which follow, containing a prayer 
for the building up of Zion, and a prediction of 
the continuous offering of sacrifice, present some 
difficulty. They do not necessarily presuppose 
that Jerusalem is in ruins ; for " build Thou the 
walls " would be no less appropriate a petition 
if the fortifications were unfinished (as we know 
they were in David's time) than if they had 
been broken down. Nor do the words contra- 
dict the view of sacrifice just given, for the use 
of the symbol and the conviction of its in- 
sufficiency co-existed, in fact, in every devout 
life, and may well be expressed side by 
side. But the transition from so intensely 
personal emotions to intercession for Zion 
seems almost too sudden even for a nature 
as wide and warm as David's. If the clos- 
ing verses are his, we may, indeed, see in 
them the king re-awaking to a sense of his 
responsibilities, which he had so long neglected, 
first, in the selfishness of his heart, and then in 
the morbid self-absorption of his remorse ; and 
the lesson may be a precious one that the first 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 22 7 

thought of a pardoned man should be for others. 
But there is much to be said, on the other hand, 
in favour of the conjecture that these verses are 
a later addition, probably after the return from 
captivity, when the walls of Zion were in ruins, 
and the altar of the temple had been long cold. 
If so, then our psalm, as it came from David's 
full heart, would be all of a piece — one great 
gush of penitence and faith, beginning with, 
" Have mercy upon me, O God," ending with 
the assurance of acceptance, and so remaining 
for all ages the chart of the thorny and yet 
blessed path that leads " from death unto life." 
In that aspect, what it does not contain is as 
noteworthy as what it does. Not one word asks 
for exemption from such penalties of his great 
fall as can be inflicted by a loving Father on a 
soul that lives in His love. He cries for pardon, 
but he gives his back to the smiters whom God 
may please to send. 

The other psalm of the penitent (xxxii.) has 
been already referred to in connection with the 
autobiographical materials which it contains. It 
is evidently of a later period than the fifty-first. 
There is no struggle in it ; the prayer has been 
heard, and this is thebeginning of the fulfilment of 



2 28 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

the VOW to show forth God's praise. In the earlier 
he had said, "Then will I teach transgressors the 
way ; " here he says, " I will instruct thee and 
teach thee in the way which thou shalt go." 
There he began with the plaintive cry for mercy; 
here with a burst of praise celebrating the 
happiness of the pardoned penitent. There we 
heard the sobs of a man in the very agony of 
abasement ; here we have the story of their 
blessed issue. There we had multiplied syno- 
nyms for sin, and for the forgiveness which was 
desired ; here it is the many-sided preciousness 
of forgiveness possessed which runs over in 
various yet equivalent phrases. There the 
highest point to which he could climb was the 
assurance that a bruised heart was accepted, 
and the bones broken might still rejoice. Here 
the very first word is of blessedness, and the 
close summons the righteous to exuberant joy. 
The one is a psalm of wailing ; the other, to use 
its own words, a " song of deliverance.'' 

What glad consciousness that he himself is 
the happy man whom he describes rings in the 
melodious variations of the one thought of 
forgiveness in the opening words ! How grate- 
fully he draws on the treasures of that recent 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 229 

experience, while he sets it forth as being the 
" taking away " of sin, as if it were the removal 
of a solid something, or the lifting of a burden off 
his back ; and as the " covering " of sin, as if it 
were the wrapping of its ugliness in thick folds 
that hide it for ever even from the all-seeing 
Eye ; and as the " non-reckoning " of sin, as if it 
were the discharge of a debt ! What vivid 
memory of past misery in the awful portrait of 
his impenitent self, already referred to — on 
which the mind dwells in silence, while the 
musical accompaniment (as directed by the 
" selah ") touches some plaintive minor or 
grating discord ! How noble and eloquent 
the brief words (echo of the historical narra- 
tive) that tell the full and swift forgiveness 
that followed simple confession — and how 
effectively the music again comes in, prolong- 
ing the thought and rejoicing in the pardon! 
How sure he is that his experience is of 
priceless value to the world for all time, 
when he sees in his absolution a motive that 
will draw all the godly nearer to their Helper 
in heaven ! How full his heart is of praise, 
that he cannot but go back again to his own 
story, and rejoice in God his hiding-place — 



230 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

whose past wondrous love assures him that in 
the future songs of deliverance will ring him 
round, and all his path be encompassed with 
music of praise. 

So ends the more personal part of the psalm. 
A more didactic portion follows, the generaliz- 
ation of that. Possibly the voice which now 
speaks is a higher than David's. *' I will instruct 
thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt 
go. I will guide thee with mine eye," scarcely 
sounds like w^ords meant to be understood as 
spoken by him. They are the promise from 
heaven of a gentle teaching to the pardoned 
man, which will instruct by no severity, but by 
patient schooling ; which will direct by no harsh 
authority, but by that loving glance that is 
enough for those who love, and is all too subtle 
and delicate to be perceived by any other. 
Such gracious direction is not for the psalmist 
alone, but it needs a spirit in harmony with 
God to understand it. For others there can be 
nothing higher than mere force, the discipline 
of sorrow, the bridle in the hard mouth, the 
whip for the stiff back. The choice for all men 
is through penitence and forgiveness to rise to 
the true position of men, capable of receiving 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 23 1 

and obeying a spiritual guidance, which appeals 
to the heart, and gently subdues the will, or by 
stubborn impenitence to fall to the level of 
brutes, that can only be held in by a halter and 
driven by a lash. And because this is the 
alternative, therefore " Many sorrows shall be to 
the wicked; but he that trusteth in the Lord, 
mercy shall compass him about." 

And then the psalm ends with a great cry of 
gladness, three times reiterated, like the voice 
of a herald on some festal day of a nation : 
"Rejoice in Jehovah! and leap for joy, O 
righteous ! and gladly shout, all ye upright in 
heart ! " 

Such is the end of the sobs of the penitent. 



232 THE LIFE OF DAVID 



XIV.— CHASTISEMENTS. 

THE chastisements, which were the natural 
fruits of David's sin, soon began to show 
themselves, though apparently ten years at least 
passed before Absalom's revolt, at which time 
he was probably a man of sixty. But these ten 
years were very weary and sad. There is no 
more joyous activity, no more conquering 
energy, no more consciousness of his people's 
love. Disasters thicken round him, and may 
all be traced to his great sin. His children 
learned the lesson it had taught them, and lust 
and fratricide desolated his family. A parent 
can have no sharper pang than the sight of his 
own sins reappearing in his child. David saw 
the ghastly reflection of his unbridled passion 
in his eldest son's foul crime (and even a gleam 
of it in his unhappy daughter), and of his 
murderous craft in his second son's bloody 
revenge. Whilst all this hell of crime is boiling 
round him, a strange passiveness seems to have 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 233 

crept over the king, and to have continued till 
his flight before Absalom. The narrative is 
singularly silent about him. He seems para- 
lysed by the consciousness of his past sin ; he 
originates nothing. He dares not punish Am- 
mon ; he can only weep when he hears of 
Absalom's crime. He weakly longs for the 
return of the latter from his exile, but cannot 
nerve himself to send for him till Joab urges it. 
A flash of his old kingliness blazes out for a 
moment in his refusal to see his son ; but even 
that slight satisfaction to justice vanishes as 
soon as Joab chooses to insist that Absalom 
shall return to court. He seems to have no 
will of his own. He has become a mere tool in 
the hands of his fierce general — and Joab's hold 
upon him was his complicity in Uriah's murder. 
Thus at every step he was dogged by the con- 
sequences of his crime, even though it was 
pardoned sin. And if, as is probable, Ahitho- 
phel was Bathsheba's grandfather, the most 
formidable person in Absalom's conspiracy, 
whose defection wounded him so deeply, was 
no doubt driven to the usurper's side out of 
revenge for the insult to his house in her person. 
Thus " of our pleasant vices doth heaven make 



234 T'HE LIFE OF DAVID 

whips to scourge us." " Be not deceived ; what- 
soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 

It IS not probable that many psalms were 
made in those dreary days. But the forty-first 
and fifty-fifth are, with reasonable probability, 
referred to this period by many commentators. 
They give a very touching picture of the old 
king during the four years in which Absalom^s 
conspiracy was being hatched. It seems, from 
the forty-first, that the pain and sorrow of his 
heart had brought on some serious illness, which 
his enemies had used for their own purposes, 
and embittered by hypocritical condolences and 
and ill-concealed glee. The sensitive nature of 
the psalmist winces under their heartless deser- 
tion of him, and pours out its plaint in this 
pathetic lament. He begins with a blessing on 
those who " consider the afflicted " — having 
reference, perhaps, to the few who were faithful 
to him in his languishing sickness. He passes 
thence to his own case, and, after humble con- 
fession of his sin, — almost in the words of the 
fifty-first psalm, — he tells how his sickbed had 
been surrounded by very different visitors. His 
disease drew no pity, but only fierce impatience 
that he lingered in life so long. " Mine enemies 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 235 

speak evil of me — when will he die, and his 
name have perished ? " One of them, in 
especial, who must have been a man in 
high position to gain access to the sick 
chamber, has been conspicuous by his lying 
words of condolence : " If he come to see me 
he speaketh vanity/' The sight of the sick king 
touched no chord of affection, but only increased 
the traitor's animosity — ''his heart gathereth 
evil to itself" — and then, having watched his 
pale face for wished-for unfavourable symptoms, 
the false friend hurries from the bedside to talk 
of his hopeless illness — "he goeth abroad, he 
telleth it." The tidings spread, and are 
stealthily passed from one conspirator to 
another. "All that hate me whisper together 
against me." They exaggerate the gravity of 
his condition, and are glad because, making the 
wish the father to the thought, they believe him 
dying. " A thing of Belial " {i.e., a destructive 
disease), " say they, is poured out upon him, 
and now that he lieth, he shall rise up no more." 
And, sharpest pang of all, that among these 
traitors, and probably the same person as he 
whose heartless presence in the sick chamber 
was so hard to bear, should be Ahithophel, 



236 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

whose counsel had been like an oracle from 
God. Even he, " the man of my friendship, in 
whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread " — 
he, like an ignoble, vicious mule — " has lifted 
high his heel " against the sick lion. 

We should be disposed to refer the thirty- 
ninth psalm also to this period. It, too, is the 
meditation of one in sickness, which he knows 
to be a Divine judgment for his sin. There is 
little trace of enemies in it ; but his attitude is 
that of silent submission, while wicked men are 
disquieted around him — which is precisely the 
characteristic peculiarity of his conduct at this 
period. It consists of two parts (vers, i — 6 and 
7 — 13), in both of which the subjects of his 
meditations are the same, but the tone of them 
different. His own sickness and mortality, and 
man's fleeting, shadowy life, are his themes. 
The former has led him to think of the latter. 
The first effect of his sorrow was to close his 
lips in a silence that was not altogether submis- 
sion. " I held my peace, even from good, and 
my sorrow was stirred." As in his sin, when he 
kept silence, his " bones waxed old,*' so now in 
his sorrow and sickness the pain that could not 
find expression raged the more violently. The 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 237 

tearless eyes were hot and aching ; but he con- 
quered the dumb spirit, and could carry his 
heavy thoughts to God. They are very heavy 
at first. He only desires that the sad truth 
may be driven deeper into his soul. With the 
engrossment so characteristic of melancholy, he 
asks, what might have been thought the thing 
he needed least, " Make me to know mine end ; " 
and then he dilates on the gloomy reflections 
which he had been cherishing in silence. Not 
only he himself, with his handbreadth of days, 
that shrink into absolute nothingness when 
brought into contrast with the life of God, but 
" every man," even when apparently " standing " 
most " firm, is only a breath." As a shadow 
every man moves spectral among shadows. 
The tumult that fills their lives is madness ; 
**only for a breath are they disquieted." So 
bitterly, with an anticipation of the sad, clear- 
eyed pity and scorn of *' The Preacher," does 
the sick and wearied king speak, in tones very 
unlike the joyous music of his earlier utterances. 
But, true and wholesome as such thoughts 
are, they are not all the truth. So the prayer 
changes in tone, even while its substance is the 
same. He rises from the shows of earth to his 



238 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

true home, driven thither by their hoUowness. 
" My hope is in Thee." The conviction of earth's 
vanity is all different when it has " tossed him 
to Thy breast." The pardoned sinner, who 
never thereafter forgot his grievous fall, asks for 
deliverance " from all his trangressions." The 
sullen silence has changed into full acquies- 
cence : " I opened not my mouth, because Thou 
didst it," — a silence differing from the other as 
the calm after the storm, when all the winds 
sleep and the sun shines out on a freshened 
world, differs from the boding stillness while 
the slow thunder-clouds grow lurid on the 
horizon. He cries for healing, for he knows his 
sickness to be the buffet and assault of God's 
hand ; and its bitterness is assuaged, even while 
its force continues, by the conviction that it is 
God's fatherly chastisement for sin which gnaws 
away his manly vigour as the moth frets his 
kingly robe. The very thought which had been 
so bitter — that every man is vanity — reappears 
in a new connection as the basis of the prayer 
that God would hear, and is modified so as to 
become infinitely blessed and hopeful. "I 
am a stranger with Thee, and a sojourner, as 
all my fathers were." A wanderer indeed. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 239 

and a transient guest on earth; but what of 
that, if he be God's guest? All that is sor- 
rowful is drawn off from the thought when we 
realise our connection with God. We are in 
God's house ; the host, not the guest, is respons- 
ible for the housekeeping. We need not feel life 
lonely if He be with us, nor its shortness sad. 
It is not a shadow, a dream, a breath, if it 
be rooted in Him. And thus the sick man has 
conquered his gloomy thoughts, even though he 
sees little before him but the end ; and he is not 
cast down even though his desires are all summed 
up in one for a little respite and healing, ere the 
brief trouble of earth be done with : " O spare me, 
that I may recover strength before I go hence, 
and be no more." 

It may be observed that this supposition of a 
protracted illness, which is based upon these 
psalms, throws light upon the singular passive- 
ness of David during the maturing of Absalom's 
conspiracy, and may naturally be supposed to 
have favoured his schemes, an essential part of 
which was to ingratiate himself with suitors who 
came to the king for judgment by affecting 
great regret that no man was deputed of the 
king to hear them. The accumxulation of untried 



240 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

causes, and the apparent disorganization of the 
judicial machinery, are well accounted for by 
David's sickness. 

The fifty-fifth psalm gives some very 
pathetic additional particulars. It is in three 
parts — a plaintive prayer and portraiture of the 
psalmist's mental distress (vers, i — 8) ; a 
vehement supplication against his foes, and 
indignant recounting of their treachery (vers. 
9 — 16) ; and, finally, a prophecy of the retribu- 
tion that IS to fall upon them (vers. 17 — 23)- 
In the first and second portions we have some 
points which help to complete our picture of the 
man. For instance, his heart " writhes " within 
him, the " terrors of death " are on him, " fear 
and trembling " are come on him, and " horror " 
has covered him. All this points, like subsequent 
verses, to his knowledge of the conspiracy before 
it came to a head. The state of the city, which 
is practically in the hands of Absalom and his 
tools, is described with bold imagery. Violence 
and Strife in possession of it, spies prowling 
about the walls day and night. Evil and Trouble 
in its midst, and Destruction, Oppression, and 
Deceit — a goodly company — flaunting in its 
open spaces. And the spirit, the brain of the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 24 1 

whole, is the trusted friend whom he had made 
his own equal, who had shared his secretest 
thoughts in private, who had walked next him 
in solemn processions to the temple. Seeing all 
this, what does the king do, who was once so 
fertile in resource, so decisive in counsel, so 
prompt in action ? Nothing. His only weapon 
is prayer. " As for me, I will call upon God ; 
and the Lord will save me. Evening, and 
morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud : 
and He shall hear my voice." He lets it all 
grow as it list, and only longs to be out of all 
the weary coil of troubles. "Oh that I had 
wings like a dove, then would I fly away and be 
at rest. Lo, I would flee far off, I would lodge 
in the wilderness. I would swiftly fly to my 
refuge from the raging wind, from the tempest." 
The langour of his disease, love for his worthless 
son, consciousness of sin, and submission to the 
chastisement through " one of his own house," 
which Nathan had foretold, kept him quiet, though 
he saw the plot winding its meshes round him. 
And in this submission patient confidence is not 
wanting, though subdued and saddened, which 
finds expression in the last words of this psalm of 
the heavy laden, "Cast thy burden upon Jehovah. 

Q 



242 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

He, He will sustain thee. ... I will trust in 
Thee." 

When the blow at last fell, the same passive 
acquiescence in what he felt to be God's chas- 
tisement is very noticeable. Absalom escapes 
to Hebron, and sets up the standard of revolt. 
When the news comes to Jerusalem the king's 
only thought is immediate flight. He is almost 
cowardly in his eagerness to escape, and is 
prepared to give up everything without a blow. 
It seems as if only a touch was needed to over- 
throw his throne. He hurries on the prepara- 
tions for flight with nervous haste. He forms no 
plans beyond those of his earlier wish to fly 
away and be at rest. He tries to denude himself 
of followers. When the six hundred men of 
Gath — who had been with him ever since his 
early days in Philistia, and had grown grey in 
his service — make themselves the van of his 
little army, he urges the heroic Ittai, their 
leader, to leave him a fugitive, and to worship 
the rising sun, " Return to thy place, and abide 
with the king'' — so thoroughly does he regard 
the crown as passed already from his brows. 
The priests with the ark are sent back ; he is not 
worthy to have the symbol of the Divine 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 243 

presence identified with his doubtful cause, and 
is prepared to submit without a murmur if God 
"thus say, I have no deHght in thee." With 
covered head and naked feet he goes up the 
slope of Olivet, and turning perhaps at that same 
bend in the rocky mountain path where the true 
King, coming to the city, wept as he saw its 
shining walls and soaring pinnacles across the 
narrow valley, the discrowned king and all his 
followers broke into passionate weeping as they 
gazed their last on the lost capital, and then 
with choking sobs rounded the shoulder of the 
hill and set their faces to their forlorn flight. 
Passing through the territory of Saul's tribe — 
dangerous ground for him to tread — the rank 
hatred of Shimei's heart blossoms into speech. 
With Eastern vehemence, he curses and flings 
stones and dust in the transports of his fury, 
stumbling along among the rocks high up on the 
side of the glen, as he keeps abreast of the little 
band below. Did David remember how the 
husband from whom he had torn Michal had 
followed her to this very place, and there had 
turned back weeping to his lonely home ? The 
remembrance, at any rate, of later and more evil 
deeds prompted his meek answer, " Let him 
curse, for the Lord hath bidden him." 



244 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

The first force of the disaster spent itself, and 
by the time he was safe across Jordan, on the 
free uplands of Bashan, his spirit rises. He 
makes a stand at Mahanaim, the place where 
his great ancestor, in circumstances somewhat 
analogous to his own, had seen the vision of 
*' bright-harnessed angels" ranked in battle array 
for the defence of himself and his own little 
band, and called the name of the place the "two 
camps." Perhaps that old story helped to 
hearten him, as the defection of Ahithophel from 
the conspiracy certainly would do. As the time 
went on, too, it became increasingly obvious 
that the leaders of the rebellion were " infirm of 
purpose," and that every day of respite from 
actual fighting diminished their chances of 
success, as that politic adviser saw so plainly. 
Whatever may have been the reason, it is clear 
that by the time David had reached Mahanaim 
he had resolved not to yield without a struggle. 
He girds on his sword once more with some of 
the animation of early days, and the light of 
trustful valour blazes again in his old eyes. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 245 



XV.— THE SONGS OF THE FUGITIVE. 

THE psalms which probably belong to the 
period of Absalom's rebellion correspond 
well with the impression of his spirit gathered 
from the historical books. Confidence in God, 
submission to His will, are strongly expressed in 
them, and we may almost discern a progress in 
the former respect as the rebellion grows. They 
flame brighter and brighter in the deepening 
darkness. From the lowest abyss the stars 
are seen most clearly. He is far more buoyant 
when he is an exile once more in the wilderness, 
and when the masks of plot and trickery are 
fallen, and the danger stands clear before him. 
Like some good ship issuing from the shelter 
of the pier heads, the first blow of the waves 
throws her over on her side and makes her 
quiver like a living thing recoiling from a terror, 
but she rises above the tossing surges and keeps 
her course. We may allocate with a fair amount 
of likelihood the following psalms to this period 



246 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

— ill. ; iv. ; xxv. (?) ; xxviii. (?) ; Iviii. (?) ; Ixi. ; 
Ixii. ; Ixiii. ; cix. (?) ; cxliii. 

The first two of these form a pair ; they are 
a morning and an evening hymn. The little 
band are encamped on their road to Mahanaim, 
with no roof but the stars, and no walls but the 
arm of God. In the former the discrowned 
king sings, as he rises from his nightly bivouac. 
He pours out first his plaint of the foes, who 
are described as "many," and as saying that, 
" There is no help for him in God," words which 
fully correspond to the formidable dimensions 
of the revolt, and to the belief which actuated 
the conspirators, and had appeared as possible 
even to himself, that his sin had turned away 
the aid of heaven from his cause. To such 
utterances of malice and confident hatred he 
opposes the conviction which had again filled 
his soul, that even in the midst of real peril and 
the shock of battle Jehovah is his "shield." 
With bowed and covered head he had fled from 
Jerusalem, but " Thou art the lifter up of mine 
head." He was an exile from the tabernacle 
on Zion, and he had sent back the ark to its 
rest ; but though he has to cry to God from 
beyond Jordan, He answers "from His holy hill." 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 247 

He and his men camped amidst dangers, but 
one unslumbering Helper mounted guard over 
their undefended slumbers. " I laid me down 
and slept " there among the echoes of the hills. 
" I awaked, for Jehovah sustained me ; " and 
another night has passed without the sudden 
shout of the rebels breaking the silence, or the 
gleam of their swords in the starlight. The 
experience of protection thus far heartens him 
to front even the threatening circle of his foes 
around him, whom it is his pain to think of as 
'' the people " of God, and yet as his foes. And 
then he betakes himself in renewed energy of 
faith to his one weapon of prayer, and even 
before the battle sees the victory, and the 
Divine power fracturing the jaws and breaking 
the teeth of the wild beasts who hunt him. But 
his last thought is not of retribution nor of fear; 
for himself he rises to the height of serene trust, 
" Salvation is of the Lord ; " and for his foes 
and for all the nation that had risen against 
him his thoughts are worthy of a true king, 
freed from all personal animosity, and his 
words are a prayer conceived in the spirit of 
Him whose dying breath was intercession for 
His rebellious subjects who crucified their King, 
"Thy blessing be upon Thy people." 



248 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

The fourth psalm is the companion evening 
hymn. Its former portion (vers. 2 — 4) seems to 
be a remonstrance addressed as if to the leaders 
of the revolt (" sons of men " being equivalent 
to " persons of rank and dignity "). It is the 
expression in vivid form, most natural to such 
a nature, of his painful feeling under their 
slanders ; and also of his hopes and desires for 
them, that calm thought in these still evening 
hours which are falling on the world may lead 
them to purer service and to reliance on God. 
So forgivingly, so lovingly does he think of 
them, ere he lays himself down to rest, wishing 
that "on their beds," as on his, the peace of 
meditative contemplation may rest, and the 
day of war's alarms be shut in by holy " commu- 
nion with their own hearts " and with God. 

The second portion turns to himself and 
his followers, among whom we may sup- 
pose some faint hearts were beginning to 
despond ; and to them, as to the very enemy, 
David would fain be the bringer of a better 
mind. " Many say. Who will show us 
good ? " He will turn them from their vain 
search round the horizon on a level with their 
own eyes for the appearance of succour. They 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 249 

must look upwards, not round about. They 
must turn their question, which only expects a 
negative answer, into a prayer, fashioned like 
that triple priestly benediction of old (Numbers 
vi. 24 — 26). His own experience bursts forth 
irrepressible. He had prayed in his hour of 
penitence, " Make me to hear joy and gladness" 
(Psa. li.) ; and the prayer had been answered, if 
not before, yet now when peril had brought 
him nearer to God, and trust had drawn God 
nearer to him. In his calamity, as is ever the 
case with devout souls, his joy increased, as 
Greek fire burns more brightly under water. 
Therefore this pauper sovereign, discrowned 
and fed by the charity of the Gileadite pastoral 
chief, sings, *^Thou hast put gladness in my 
heart, more than in the time that their corn and 
wine increased." And how tranquilly the psalm 
closes, and seems to lull itself to rest, " In peace 
I will at once lie down and sleep, for Thou, O 
Jehovah, only makest me dwell safely." The 
growing security which experience of God's care 
should ever bring, is beautifully marked by the 
variation on the similar phrase in the previous 
psalm. There he gratefully recorded that he 
had laid himself down and slept ; here he 



250 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

promises himself that he will lie down "in 
peace ; " and not only so, but that at once on 
his lying down he will sleep — kept awake by 
no anxieties, by no bitter thoughts, but, home- 
less and in danger as he is, will close his eyes, 
like a tired child, without a care or a fear, and 
forthwith sleep, with the pressure and the protec- 
tion of his Father's arm about him. 

This psalm sounds again the glad trustful 
strain which has slumbered in his harp-strings 
ever since the happy old days of his early trials, 
and is re-awakened as the rude blast of calamity 
sweeps through them once more. 

The sixty-third psalm is by the superscription 
referred to the time when David was "in the 
wilderness of Judah," which has led many 
readers to think of his long stay there during 
SauFs persecution. But the psalm certainly 
belongs to the period of his reign, as is obvious 
from its words, " The king shall rejoice in God.'* 
It must therefore belong to his brief sojourn in 
the same wilderness on his flight to Mahanaim, 
when, as we read in 2 Sam., " The people were 
weary and hungry and thirsty in the wilder- 
ness." There is a beautiful progress of thought 
in it, which is very obvious if we notice the 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 25 1 

triple occurrence of the words " my soul," and 
their various connections — " my soul thirsteth," 
" my soul is satisfied," " my soul foUoweth hard 
after Thee ; " or, in other words, the psalm is a 
transcript of the passage of a believing soul 
from longing through fruition to firm trust, 
in which it is sustained by the right hand of 
God. 

The first of these emotions, which is so 
natural to the fugitive in his sorrows, is ex- 
pressed with singular poetic beauty in language 
borrowed from the ashen grey monotony of the 
waterless land in which he was. One of our 
most accurate and least imaginative travellers 
describes it thus : " There were no signs of 
vegetation, with the exception of a few reeds 
and rushes, and here and there a tamarisk." 
This lonely land, cracked with drought, as if 
gaping with chapped lips for the rain that comes 
not, is the image of his painful yearning for 
the Fountain of living waters. As his men 
plodded along over the burning marl, faint- 
ing for thirst and finding nothing in the dry 
torrent beds, so he longed for the refreshment 
of that gracious presence. Then he remembers 
how in happier days he had had the same 



252 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

desires, and they had been satisfied in the 
tabernacle. Probably the words should read, 
"Thus in the sanctuary have I gazed upon 
Thee, to see Thy power and Thy glory." In the 
desert and in the sanctuary his longing had 
been the same, but then he had been able to 
behold the symbol which bore the name, " the 
glory," — and now he wanders far from it. How 
beautifully this regretful sense of absence from 
and pining after the ark is illustrated by those 
inimitably pathetic words of the fugitive's 
answer to the priests who desired to share his 
exile. " And the king said unto Zadok, Carry 
back the ark of God into the city. If I find 
favour in the eyes of the Lord, He will bring 
me again, and show me both it and His habit- 
ation." 

The fulfilment is cotemporaneous with the 
desire. The swiftness of the answer is beauti- 
fully indicated in the quick turn with which the 
psalm passes from plaintive longing to exu- 
berant rapture of fruition. In the one breath 
"my soul thirsteth;" in the next, "my soul is 
satisfied" — as when in tropical lands the rain 
comes, and in a day or two what had been 
baked earth is rich meadow, and the dry 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 253 

torrent-beds, where the white stones glistered 
in the sunshine, foam with rushing waters and 
are edged with budding willows. The fulness 
of satisfaction when God fills the soul is vividly 
expressed in the familiar image of the feast 
of "marrow and fatness," on which he ban- 
quets even while hungry in the desert. The 
abundant delights of fellowship with God make 
him insensible to external privations, are drink 
for him thirsty, food for his hunger, a home in 
his wanderings, a source of joy and music in 
the midst of much that is depressing : " My 
mouth shall praise Thee with joyful lips." The 
little camp had to keep keen look-out for 
nightly attacks ; and it is a slight link of con- 
nection, very natural under the circumstances, 
between the psalms of this period, that they all 
have some references to the perilous hours of 
darkness. We have found him laying himself 
down to sleep in peace ; here he wakes, not to 
guard from hostile surprises, but in the silence 
there below the stars to think of God and feel 
again the fulness of His all-sufficiency. Happy 
thoughts, not fears, hold His eyes waking. " I 
remember Thee upon my bed." 

The fruition heartens for renewed exercise of 



2 54 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

confidence, in which David feels himself upheld 
by God, and foresees his enemies' defeat and 
his own triumph. " My soul cleaveth after 
Thee " — a remarkable phrase, in which the two 
metaphors of tenacious adherence and eager 
following are mingled to express the two 
"phases of faith," which are really one — of 
union with and quest after God, the possession 
which pursues, the pursuit which possesses Him 
who is at once grasped and felt after by the 
finite creature whose straitest narrowness is not 
too narrow to be blessed by some indwelling of 
God, but whose widest expansion of capacity 
and desire can but contain a fragment of His 
fulness. From such elevation of high com- 
munion he looks down and onward into the dim 
future, his enemies sunken, like Korah and his 
rebels, into the gaping earth, or scattered in 
fight, and the jackals that were snuffing hungrily 
about his camp in the wilderness gorging them- 
selves on corpses, while he himself, once more 
"king,'' shall rejoice in God, and with his faith- 
ful companions, whose lips and hearts were true 
to God and His anointed, shall glory in the 
deliverance that by the arbitrament of victory 
has flung back the slanders of the rebels in 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 255 

their teeth, and choked them with their own 
lies. 

Our space forbids more than a brief reference 
to psalm Ixii., which seems also to belong to 
this time. It has several points of contact 
with those already considered, e.g.^ the phrase, 
'' sons of men," in the sense of '' nobles " (ver. 
9) ; " my soul," as equivalent to " myself," and 
yet as a kind of quasi-separate personality 
which he can study and exhort ; the significant 
use of the term " people," and the double ex- 
hortations to his own devout followers and to 
the arrogant enemy. The whole tone is that of 
patient resignation, which we have found char- 
acterising David now. The first words are the 
key-note of the whole, '^ Truly unto God my 
soul is silence " — is all one great stillness of 
submissive waiting upon Him. It was in the 
very crisis of his fate, in the suspense of the 
uncertain issue of the rebellion, that these 
words, the very sound of which has calmed 
many a heart since, welled to his lips. The ex- 
pression of unwavering faith and unbroken 
peace is much heightened by the frequent re- 
currence of the word which is variously trans- 
lated " truly," " surely," and " only." It carries 



256 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

the force of confident affirmation, like the 
"verily'* of the New Testament, and is here 
most significantly prefixed to the assertions of 
his patient resignation (ver. i); of God's defence 
(ver. 2) ; of the enemies' whispered counsels 
(ver. 4) ; to his exhortation of his soul to the 
resignation which it already exercises (ver. 5) ; 
and to the triumphant reiteration of God's all- 
sufficient protection. How beautifully, too, does 
that reiteration — almost verbal repetition — of 
the opening words strengthen the impression of 
his habitual trust. His soul in its silence mur- 
murs to itself, as it were, the blessed thoughts 
over and over again. Their echoes haunt his 
spirit " lingering and wandering on, as loth to 
die;" and if for a moment the vision of his 
enemies disturbs their flow, one indignant ques- 
tion flung at them suffices, '' How long will ye 
rush upon a man ? (how long) will ye all of you 
thrust him down as (if he were) a bowing wall, 
a tottering fence.'*" and with a rapid glance at 
their plots and bitter words, he comes back 
again to his calm gaze on God. Lovingly he 
accumulates happy names for Him,' which, in 
their imagery, as well as in their i repetition, 
remind us of the former songs of the fugitive. 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 257 

" My rock," in whom I hide ; " He is my sal- 
vation," which is even more than ''from Him 
Cometh my salvation ; " my " fortress," my 
''glory," "the rock of my strength," "my refuge." 
So many phases of his need and of God's suffi- 
ciency thus gathered together, tell how familiar 
to the thoughts and real to the experience of 
the aged fugitive was his security in Jehovah, 
The thirty years since last he had wandered 
there have confirmed the faith of his earlier 
songs; and though the ruddy locks of the young 
chieftain are silvered with grey now, and sins 
and sorrows have saddened him, yet he can 
take up again with deeper meaning the tones 
of his old praise, and let the experience of age 
seal with its "verily" the hopes of youth. Ex- 
hortations to his people to unite themselves 
with him in his faith, and assurances that God 
is a refuge for them too, with solemn warnings 
to the rebels, close this psalm of glad submission. 
It is remarkable for the absence of all petitions. 
He needs nothing beyond what he has. As the 
companion psalm says, his soul "is satisfied." 
Communion with God has its moments of rest- 
ful blessedness, when desire is stilled, and expires 
in peaceful fruition. 

R 



258 THE LIFE OF DAVID 

The other psalms of this period must be left un- 
noticed. The same general tone pervades them 
all. In many particulars they closely resemble 
those of the Sauline period. But the resem- 
blance fails very significantly at one point. The 
emphatic assertion of his innocence is gone for 
ever. Pardoned indeed he is, cleansed, con- 
scious of God's favour, and able to rejoice in it ; 
but carrying to the end the remembrance of his 
sore fall, and feeling it all the more penitently, 
the more he is sure of God's forgiveness. Let 
us remember that there are sins which, once 
done, leave their traces on memory and con- 
science, painting indelible forms on the walls of 
our "chambers of imagery," and transmitting 
results which remission and sanctifying do not, 
on earth at least, wholly obliterate. Let David's 
youthful prayer be ours, *^ Keep back Thy ser- 
vant from presumptuous sins : then shall I be 
upright, and I shall be innocent from much 
transgression." 

It does not fall within the scope of this vol- 
ume to deal with the suppression of Absalom's 
revolt, nor with the ten years of rule that re- 
mained to David after his restoration. The 
psalter does not appear to contain psalms which 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 259 

throw light upon the somewhat clouded closing 
years of his reign. One psalm, indeed, there is 
attributed to him, which is, at any rate, the 
work of an old man — a sweet song into which 
mellow wisdom has condensed its final lessons 
— and a snatch of it may stand instead of any 
summing-up of the life by us : 

" Trust ill the Lord, and do good ; 
Dwell in the land, and enjoy security ; 
Delight thyself also in the Lord, 
And He shall give thee the desires of thy heart. 
Commit thy way unto the Lord. 

Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him. 

I have been young and now am old, 

Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken. 

I have seen the wicked in great power, 

And spreading himself like a green tree. . . , 

Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not.^^ 

May we not apply the next words to the 
psalmist himself, and hear him calling us to 
look on him as he lies on his dying bed — dis- 
turbed though it were by ignoble intrigues of 
hungry heirs — after so many storms nearing the 
port ; after so many vicissitudes, close to the 
unchanging home ; after so many struggles, 
resting quietly on the breast of God : " Mark 
the perfect man, and behold the upright, for the 



26o THE LIFE OF DAVID 

end of that man is peace?" Into this opal 
cahimess, as of the Hquid Hght of sunset, all the 
flaming splendours of the hot day have melted. 
The music of his songs die away into " peace ; " 
as when some master holds our ears captive 
with tones so faint that we scarce can tell sound 
from silence, until the jar of common noises, 
which that low sweetness had deadened, rushes 
in. 

One strain of a higher mood is preserved for 
us in the historical books that prophesy of the 
true King, whom his own failures and sins, no 
less than his consecration and victories, had 
taught him to expect. The dying eyes see on 
the horizon of the far-ofif future the form of 
Him who is to be a just and perfect ruler; before 
the brightness of whose presence, and the re- 
freshing of whose influence, verdure and beauty 
shall clothe the world. As the shades gather, 
that radiant glory to come brightens. He 
departs in peace, having seen the salvation from 
afar. It was fitting that this fullest of his 
prophecies should be the last of his strains, as 
if the rapture which thrilled the trembling 
strings had snapped them in twain. 

And then, for earth, the richest voice which 



AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS. 26 I 

God ever tuned for His praise was hushed, and 
the harp of Jesse's son hangs untouched above 
his grave. But for him death was God's last, 
best answer to his prayer, '' O Lord, open Thou 
my hps ; " and as that cold but most loving 
hand unclothes him from the weakness of flesh, 
and leads him in among the choirs of heaven, 
we can almost hear again his former thanks- 
giving breaking from his immortal lips, " Thou 
hast put a new song into my mouth," whose 
melodies, unsaddened by plaintive minors 
of penitence and pain, are yet nobler and 
sweeter than the psalms which he sang here, 
and left to be the solace and treasure of all 
generations ! 



TUKNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH 



INDEX. 



'SALM 


PAGE 


PSALM 






PAGE 


iii. 


. 246 


xxxiv. ... 86 


iv. 


. 248 


xxxv. 






139 


vii. 


. IIO 


xxxvii. 






259 


viii. 


. 28 


xxxix. 






236 


xi. 


. 138 


xli. 






234 


xiii. 


. 138 


li. 






209 


XV. 


. 177 


Hi. 






72 


xvii. 


. 138 


liv. 






100 


xviii. . I 


53 and 157 


Iv. 






240 


xix. 


. 24 


Ivi. 






• 77 


XX. 


. 203 


Ivii. 






. 119 


xxii. 


. 14T 


lix. 






63 


xxiii. 


. 37 


Ix. 






201 


xxiv. 


. 177 


Ixii. 






255 


XXV. 


. 138 


Ixiii. 






250 


xxvii. 


. 89 


Ixiv. 






138 


xxix. 


. 31 


Ixviii. 






208 


xxxi. 


. 132 


ex. 






189 


xxxii. 


. 227 


cxliii. 






128 



V 



^Iie |^0U0£h0lb pbrarg oi ©xjJCBttion. 



THE LIFE OF DAVID 

AS REFLECTED IN HIS PSALMS, 

By Alexander Maclaren, D.D. 

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